Porex’s Journey to Collaborative Integration with Cloud-based PLM

Porex is an innovator of porous materials including sintered porous plastics. They faced several challenges in creating a collaborative product development environment before eventually deciding on a cloud-based solution from Autodesk.

Porex manufactures porous parts for a wide range of products from markers to home scent diffusers, from medical and bioscience devices such as dialysis systems to DNA research equipment. Porex is constantly investing its resources in developing new innovative porous materials and propriety technology to address a wide variety of industries.

Challenges to Product Development Collaboration at Porex
Faced with increasing international demand for its products, Porex decided to acquire an international porous plastics manufacturer. This acquisition, and others like it, brought home-grown product development systems into Porex's IT portfolio.  

This was the environment that Avi Robbins inherited when he joined Porex as Director of global product development.  Avi pointed out, "Working with offshore manufacturers in Asia created further challenges for data sharing for the product development team.   Without a unifying vision, Porex's internationally distributed product development and manufacturing facilities used disparate project and product development systems.  They acted essentially like sister companies that could not share product information without a great deal of effort."

Components of the Porex product development environment included Microsoft excel, access databases, shared drives and batch jobs on servers to sync data across international locations. As a result, customers in Europe, for example, had to wait for up to a day to get material specifications, product costs and product drawings for parts that were developed by the research and development team in the United States.

Avi set a goal for Porex to alleviate data management and sharing issues with a single product lifecycle management system. His goal for the new PLM system was to unify their global enterprise product development team to improve project transparency, leverage reuse of existing data and provide access to the most up-to-date product data. With these efficiencies, Porex was counting on the new PLM system to help them achieve the target of doubling their current revenue in next five years.

A Complex Enterprise Systems Environment
Porex managed its product and project data with various SharePoint sites in addition to the home grown systems. Avi wanted to link product information with the company's two different enterprise resource planning systems, a manufacturing execution system, a customer relationship management and computer aided design data. Porex wanted to resolve these product data challenges with a product lifecycle system that met the following criteria:

1. Easy to use
2. Provides document collaboration and management
3. Includes the ISO standard for product and parts
4. Has a low TOC (total cost of ownership)
5. High degree of collaboration and integration with existing disparate systems
6. Provides real time project transparency

 Porex Enterprise PLM Experience
After conducting their search for a solution that met these requirements, Porex decided to implement Autodesk PLM 360 to manage product data and collaboration. Beyond the basic PLM functions, Porex also manages its project pipelines, quality plans, plan linking, and navigation to various product records with Autodesk PLM360.

 "With Autodesk PLM 360, we were up and running in three to four months" said Avi. The business process owners at Porex are able to modify and configure Autodesk PLM 360 without any help from IT support or from software developers. He added, "Because we were able to bypass developers and IT, we could successfully create business processes within Autodesk PLM 360 to save time, leading to quicker return on investment."

Moving business processes to the cloud raises concerns about security and intellectual property in the minds of many manufacturers. Porex is also concerned about security to help the company remain an innovation leader in the porous plastics domain.  Avi pointed out that Autodesk can provide stronger data security protection than Porex could put in place if it had to maintain PLM on its own servers.

Another concern that many manufacturers have with cloud-based solutions is that bandwidth issues can cause the application response time to be slow, especially amongst globally distributed teams. Porex did not face bandwidth challenges with Autodesk PLM 360. Avi reported that the Porex teams in the Americas, Europe and Asia are able to access data seamlessly without any delays. The company's manufacturing unit in Malaysia (Asia) is able to access the same product and project data with real time updates as the research and development department in Atlanta.  With the Autodesk PLM 360 mobile app, Porex has able to improve real time collaboration between various project stakeholders.

"Our product development collaboration environment has come a long way," said Avi, pointing out that the users outside of the traditional product development roles can now also access the product data that they need.  In fact, Porex plans to ramp up to 140 users on Autodesk PLM 360 this year.

Note: Autodesk has sponsored promotion of their PLM solutions on ENGINEERING.com. They have no editorial input to this post - all opinions are mine. – Sanjeev Pal