Oracle has unveiled Agile Customer Needs Management, part of its Product Value Chain suite, to manage and automate the front-end innovation process across product value chain.
The company claims that the new offering enables customers to capture and prioritise product ideas, customer feedback and product requirements from internal sources including product managers, engineers, sales and executives and external sources such as customers, design partners and suppliers.
Oracle said that the new module helps product teams to manage and optimise the ideation processes through a collaborative environment designed to facilitate the capture, collaboration, conceptualisation, design validation and prioritisation of customer needs, product ideas, customer feedback and product requirements.
According to Oracle, the Agile Customer Needs Management provides multiple Enterprise 2.0 features such as tagging, reviewing and comments and web 2.0-based user interface to enable a collaborative, open-innovation platform. The product also includes functionality for managing specifications and quotes for custom products for engineer-to-order divisions of hi-tech and industrial manufacturing companies.
In addition, the new offering, leveraging Oracle Universal Content Management and AutoVue Enterprise Visualization, enables customers to collaborate, view and digitally annotate any product information and engineering drawings to facilitate multi-disciplinary document collaboration.
Hardeep Gulati, vice president PLM and PIM Product Strategy at Oracle, said: "We are broadening our Product Value Chain leadership with the launch of Agile Customer Needs Management, allowing companies to effectively manage creative ideas and customer requirements that will generate the most value for their R&D investment.
"By providing enterprise 2.0 social features and an easy-to-use user interface, customers can leverage the collective intelligence of their employees, customers and partners to identify the features with greatest market potential. This helps promote a culture of open innovation."
