Recently, the bidding results of the "Inspur Information IPD Process Informatization Construction Project" were officially announced, and Econage's AlphaFlow IPD process solution successfully won the bid! Based on the AlphaFlow BPA process management and automation platform, it will help Inspur Information's IPD end-to-end business process cross-domain collaboration standards and process integration operations, promote the comprehensive online management of IPD backbone product stage processes, and achieve the innovative goal of "unified processes, unified master data, and unified IT systems."
IPD Integrated Product Development
IPD (Integrated Product Development) is a set of product development models, concepts and methods. IPD originated from the book "Product and Lifecycle Optimization Method" (PACE for short - Product And Cycle-time Excellence) published by PRTM in the United States. The book describes in detail the various aspects of the IPD product development model.
The traditional product development work is a serial process. After the work in each field is completed, it is handed over to the next field. The main problems of this model are low efficiency, rework, difficult handover, and easy to argue. The product development work under the IPD system is a parallel process. Each field carries out work at the same time according to the main tasks of each stage of IPD, and periodically reviews the work results to determine whether there is a risk to proceed to the next step.
AlphaFlow IPD process solution uses the successful practices of benchmark companies to help companies build a management system from market demand to product development and innovation, and finally to the successful launch of products throughout the life cycle.
Inspur Information IPD full-process platform application
Inspur Information is a global leading provider of IT infrastructure products, solutions and services. As of now, the company has 8 R&D centers, 10 production bases, and 26 branches, with business in more than 120 countries and regions. Since its establishment, Inspur Information has been deeply involved in the two major sectors of servers and components, and IT terminals and parts. In 2023, its server market share ranked second in the world and first in China; storage ranked among the top three in the world and first in China; liquid-cooled servers ranked first in China.
As a pioneer in domestic server manufacturing, Inspur Information has taken the lead in introducing the AlphaFlow EBPA process planning and design platform within the group at the beginning of this year, completing the unified modeling of the overall business architecture and end-to-end business processes of various departments and lines. However, in the face of high-cost core technology research and development and product development, how can we achieve business goals such as shortening product development cycles, reducing product costs, increasing per capita output, and reducing mid-term project cancellations through cross-departmental team sharing and collaboration?
Therefore, Inspur Information introduced the IPD process with market demand as the driving force for product development, and began to implement the second phase project around the two overall goals of "connecting the IPD business process execution with the BPA process planning and design platform to achieve synchronous alignment of the basic elements of process management; connecting the IPD business process with the underlying core support system to achieve the informatization of process activities and process integration operation", and strive to achieve the following construction goals:
1. Unify process integration operation to achieve cross-system process and data connection. Connect the core business systems deployed at each stage of the product development process with the IPD process platform, and connect the processes and data between the original independent business systems, such as realizing the unification of the processes and data of the secondary business systems such as the demand management system ALM/PLM, the R&D project management system RDM, the R&D lifecycle management system PLM, CRM, ERP, MES, etc.
2. Collaborate across teams to achieve end-to-end management of IPD cross-domain processes. Solidify the processes that were originally maintained by the manual offline responsibility system and could not be updated in a targeted manner; the processes that were scattered in the core business systems at each stage of IPD and manually uploaded by process personnel to a unified process management platform, and achieve unified modeling, execution and monitoring management of IPD end-to-end business processes, breaking the traditional product development block-shaped working mode, and realizing process-driven IPD business operation and cross-system data integration.
3. Unified process data analysis. Based on the full process management of IPD business, through the comparative analysis of planning and design data and actual operation data, the status of each dimension of the business is intuitively displayed, and problems in the actual implementation of the process are discovered. While providing data support for subsequent process analysis and optimization, potential risks are identified and decision-making is facilitated.
4. Unified IPD portal. After entering the IPD project portal, employees in each business domain can intuitively view all project details such as postponed, unexecuted, normal, and early, and can quickly initiate, handle and view the corresponding project-related content, realizing unified display, handling and viewing of projects.
5. The precipitation of IPD business process assets will transform accidental success into building a reusable, sustainable, stable and high-quality management system, effectively improving the efficiency and quality of subsequent similar product development.
The construction of this IPD process informationization project will help Inspur Information achieve a more efficient product development process, improve market response speed and industry core competitiveness, and gain advantages in the fierce market competition.
