A semiconductor company upgraded to a new 9.3.x minor revision and saw a decrease in performance. All standard health checks were fine including Averify. GoSaaS dug deep and determined that a core automation API call was slower than expected due to a slow API call. An Oracle patch for the Java API fixed the issue. While Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM ) is an excellent tool for product innovation, product development, your company may not be fully leveraging your Agile PLM investment. Your system may greatly benefit from a technical health assessment. We have compiled a list of some of the most common challenges our customers encounter that you may be experiencing but haven't had a chance to investigate: Critical Business Process Evaluation Change cycle time was getting longer to get parts released for broadband equipment designers. This was slowing down both critical and non-critical product modifications. Upon evaluation with the customer, two separate workflows based on criticality were implemented, the low critical one having just engineering approval instead of the entire CCB. We can help evaluate usage by doing deep analysis reports on trends in utilization and trends to suggest business process modifications aligned to the users and objectives. GoSaaS can help you implement workflow optimization, criteria-based rules, right sizing, classes, attributes and process extensions to gain the best value and efficiencies from Agile PLM. Disaster Recovery A data center is vulnerable to unpredictable events, therefore you never keep on data in one location. Mission-critical business continuity in the face of natural disasters and unforeseen events requires advanced preparation and saving irreplaceable business-critical data. Global corporations are geographically distributed over the world. Data centers should also be separated with a backup built into the infrastructure. You should plan for backup systems with failover or move to a more cloud-centric infrastructure. We can help you create a multi-node architecture with failover or help you migrate to a hosting provider or AWS. Backup Testing A company diligently backs up Oracle database exports but not the server backup. A server outage requires a rebuild but is determined that the OS is unsupported. A database backup cannot be recovered unless the server was backed up also. Having a backup system in place is critical since it will save you from productivity and financial loss if your system gets compromised or corrupted. Re-evaluation of your backup strategy with restoration testing ensures that the backup is operating and performing its purpose. In times of need or emergency, a bad backup is of no use. We help ensure you can get operations back quickly from any loss. Security Checks A defense contractor had allowed suppliers and manufacturers to log in and were using a single select list to inhibit visibility to other parts. This was changed to a multi-select list since the business required that multiple vendors could supply the same piece-part. The security worked fine but the multi-select attribute was visible and vendors could see the competition. Your business may require suppliers to have restricted access to your PLM systems. You may need to audit that data access is entirely secure and that necessary precautions are taken to prevent crucial information from being leaked. Unrestricted access can expose your company's intellectual property. These can also lead to compliance issues that must be adhered to in your industry. Load Testing Users at a network equipment company were refusing to use PPM due to system slowdowns and going back to spreadsheets for NPD eliminating the value of enterprise projects and resource visibility. A load test leads to discovering corrupt indices and an incorrect PX implementation causing recursive events. Users of Agile Product Lifecycle Management may be dissatisfied with the system's response time. A sluggish system may compound over time and be bound to incur frustration and loss of adoption by users. It's worth investigating and comparing with the benchmark for your Agile PLM. A load test of your Agile system can uncover potential underlying optimization issues. Custom Live Dashboards A mixed signal IC manufacturer had engineers reluctant to use the approval process and stayed with manual activity. GoSaaS designed an approval dashboard that summarizes all the changes with relevant information laid out on one screen with the ability to approve from the dashboard controls or drill down further for details. Users of Agile PLM often feel that the interface is not user-friendly when dealing with the feature-rich out-the of-the-box interface. Sometimes, a simplified user experience (with the option to drill deeper) helps get faster human processing. GoSaaS thrive.gs makes customized dashboards that are interactive. The dashboards show you the most important information first and helps you navigate quickly through the unnecessary details. Each custom dashboard is made to complement the needs of the user, and the interface outside of the dashboard is given a lot of attention. GoSaaS thrive .gs finds the problem and fixes it so that the experience is more intuitive and efficient. Recurrent Unknown Errors Some errors have no apparent reason and require root cause comprehensive analysis. Many companies have had user frustration and process outages due to intermittent errors. We overlook and become accustomed to the errors generated by refreshing or logging out. This may be a symptom of a more serious underlying server issue. Constant errors and crashes reduce productivity and have a negative impact on your business, such as lost opportunities and income. GoSaaS can determine the root cause whether it is server side, proxy/network, Java version, browser incompatibility, or misbehaving process extensions. Ignored Security Patches With a supported Agile PLM version , you get access to all security patches as part of the support. Your system will be vulnerable to malicious activity and exploits. Updates of security patches on a regular basis prevent such data breaches at the application or database level. Security patches are a small effort of prevention to avoid entangled security corrective actions. Difficulty in Agile PLM Integrations A medical device company acquires two other smaller companies and as a condition of the acquisition must retain their ERP systems. The PLM team, on the release of a BOM must “swivel chair” to copy part information into the other ERP systems. This can easily create points of failure and consistency of data through the operational systems. Connecting PLM to other core enterprise software like ERP, MES, CRM or even CAD can create efficiencies and guarantee integrity of data down the enterprise. Integrations are critical to do right on a reliable platform that assures reliability, queueing, sequencing, and failure re-processing. GoSaaS integrator, GSI, is a reliable integration platform that quickly deploys integrations using common prebuilt adapters or creates new ones. Our GSI solution follows standards for how integration should perform with transactional integrity with persistent queueing. It has a collection of pre-built adapters that lets it support dynamic mappings and data transformations based on complex business rules. If any of the above problems are happening to you, your Agile PLM system could use a Technical Health Check . GoSaaS Thrive Technical Health Check is a comprehensive multi-point that assesses the architecture, tests the functional performance of both configuration and process extensions, evaluates the database parameters, and if determined, gives suggestions of areas of improvement via Oracle scripts, Oracle patches, or other areas of improvement. Schedule a convenient time slot with GoSaaS thrive .gs to learn more about how we'll help you spot early signs of an Agile PLM system that have been ignored. We’ll also identify ways that the company can operate more efficiently and give your employees a better experience with the system. Author's Bio: Arif Ansari​ Partner in General Management Thrive Arif Ansari is a Partner at GoSaaS with more than 15 years experience helping product development enterprises get increased value from their PLM investments. He holds graduate degrees in Engineering Management and Computer Science. An enthusiast of aviation, in his spare time he is a private pilot.

Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) helps organizations manage and streamline the product development process. It offers a range of features to support product development, planning, collaboration, and execution across the entire product lifecycle. Is Oracle Agile PLM End-of-life Near? A Resounding No! Agile PLM is more stable than ever with a planned 9.3.7 release in 2024 with premium support until 2029. Oracle will maintain sustaining support indefinitely as of now. Before you consider alternatives to Agile PLM, Oracle continues extending out the support lifetime. As of now, Agile 9.3.6 users will continue to receive full support until August 2025. Premier support means all bugs will be fixed with patches provided or suitable workarounds will be communicated. Security updates will resolve all known security vulnerabilities. 9.3.7 will resolve in 2024 and premier support is guaranteed to mid-year 2029. Oracle guarantees premier support for a minimum of five years from the release date of a new major dot. 9.3.6 premier support was extended to eight years from 2017 to 2025, so it's reasonable to expect that the new 9.3.7 will be fully supported into the 2030’s. Once the premier support lapses, sustained support is maintained. Sustained support means only known bugs in security vulnerabilities will be resolved. Engineering collaboration and Oracle product lifecycle analytics are premier supported until 2029 and also PLM for process in autoview pro until 2027. Is Agile PLM being discontinued by Oracle? This is not true as the new version, 9.3.7 comes out in 2024. Is Agile PLM being sunset by Oracle and will no longer be supported? Not true as premier support extends to 2029 based on what we have seen with 9.3.6, so for the latest version, it will most probably extend well into the 2030’s. Agile PLM Support: Ensuring Optimal Level of Functionality, Utilization and Performance Now that we have established that Agile PLM’s support is being extended for a decade or more, here are ways you can gain more out of your investment for the forthcoming years. Any enterprise system will need regular maintenance for best performance and user experience. The Agile system may encounter automation fixes, performance issues and data optimization. It is essential to perform maintenance on the PLM for performance in order to maximize its benefits. This involves doing periodic health checks on your system. Health checks and maintenance of the PLM data is necessary. Health Check Testing Our Agile PLM Health Check will uncover the causes of these issues and we will provide a detailed report with recommended remediation actions. These could include running scripts from Oracle Support, reconfiguration of infrastructure or optimizing PX based automations. ​ Webinar Replay: Are Your Agile PLM and Oracle EBS Applications Healthy? Are Your On-Premise Systems not meeting your expectations? Watch our webinar replay to learn just how we can help you uncover the cause of performance issues and provide detailed recommendations. Watch Replay Keep Current with Agile PLM Version Upgrade Your Oracle support agreement allows you to keep current with the latest release of Agile. Upgrades to the current release are strongly suggested and required for latest functionality enhancements and continuing Oracle premium support. Concerns while performing upgrades - Updated infrastructure or migration to cloud hosted infrastructure Minimize downtime for business Security of your product data during migration Regression testing of all functionality Regression testing of integrations Regression testing of automations Many opt for the alternative of getting hosting services instead of in-house capital expenditure for infrastructure. We can help you relocate to the cloud while upgrading your Agile PLM software. GoSaaS has partnerships with Agile PLM hosting providers that will ensure you will keep premium Oracle support and conversion of licenses to a SaaS model. Oracle Agile PLM's most recent release is 9.3.6 and 9.3.7 will be available in 2024. 9.3.6 contains new features that can further enable customization and offer an improved user experience. thrive .gs has built and managed a large library of Process Extensions (using Java API, Groovy, Web Services) to create an improved user experience and process efficiencies: Alcatel Lucent selected thrive.gs for migration of on-premise Agile PLM servers to AWS. Agile PLM Integrations Agile PLM can integrate with a variety of other peripheral upstream and downstream systems to support external collaboration and operational aspects of the product development and manufacturing process. Examples of integrations: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems : Product data under change control flows to ERP the system for commercial transactions such as planning of supply chain operations and scheduling production. This is the most common outbound integration for most PLM systems. Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems : ECAD and MCAD systems are connected to the PLM product data for pushing and updating design artifacts into the change controlled product data repository. Your CAD team can have data directly accessed from the PLM system Collaboration and project management tools : Agile PLM can be integrated with tools like Microsoft Teams or Asana to facilitate communication and collaboration among cross-functional teams working on a product. MES (Manufacturing) systems : Agile PLM can be integrated with manufacturing or floor shop manufacturing systems systems to send quality events from track to Quality Management (PQM) in Agile to report back via NCRs on product manufacturing issues thereby allowing design team to update the design specs or BOM in PLM via change control. CRM (Customer) systems : Agile PLM can be integrated with CRM systems to manage and track customer interactions and feedback throughout the product development process and specially after production. Overall, Agile PLM integrations can help organizations streamline and automate various aspects of the product development process, improving efficiency and enabling better decision-making. thrive.gs Integrator is a lightweight, scalable enterprise integration solution which works seamlessly with both on-premise and cloud applications. thrive.gs integrator is designed for the synchronization of objects between any two systems. It is a message based integration system that has the capability to pull or push the data from any complex system based upon the invoke/trigger adapters. Mappings and transformation can be carried out to ensure conformity to the destination format. It is a framework to build complex, high performance and robust integrations between the systems. We have implemented Microservices architecture for the sake of scalability and reusability. We offer integrations between: Agile PLM-ERP Agile PLM-mCAD Agile PLM-eCAD Agile PLM-Service Oracle Agile PLM to/from Oracle EBS Oracle Agile PLM to/from NetSuite Oracle Agile PLM to/from SAP Oracle Agile PLM to/from Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Agile PLM Security Security is the strong point of the Agile PLM systems and without a doubt the primary consideration for all enterprises working on highly proprietary or classified data. You may need to highly compartmentalize discovery and read access based on business specific criteria. New clients, suppliers, customers, or requirements requiring segregation of development teams may necessitate refactoring of the security model created at the inception of the implementation. You should firstly upgrade to the most recent version of your Agile PLM. You must implement secure development procedures and data controls that do not compromise your data and PLM security. thrive .gs provides ITAR-like compliance for the product data for businesses as they develop or when security-sensitive business units are added. The security model needs to be updated to take into account new selection criteria. In 2023 , Agile PLM continues to be a capable, scalable, mature and functionality rich tool that can help organizations manage the product, processes, and resources throughout the product development lifecycle. It is essential to be informed and have access to training and support resources, be familiar with best practices, and understand potential enhanced security measures to effectively use Agile PLM in the coming year. By staying informed, enterprises can get the most out of the PLM application and support their organization's direction. ​ ​ Author's Bio: Mehr Qasim Technical Content Writer Mehrunisa Qasim is a skilled technical content writer with over 5 years of experience in the technology industry. Mehrunisa has a deep understanding of technical concepts and a passion for writing about them in a way that is understandable to non-technical readers. She has written content for a variety of audiences, including technical guides, white papers, case studies, and blog posts. .