Developing smart, connected products and software is complex. And when you consider that software and product developers must also meet strict regulatory and safety standards and increasingly variant designs, complexity escalates exponentially. The IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) environment not only helps improve collaboration and productivity, but also can provide a crucial view across the entire product lifecycle.  This means you can more easily track changes, minimize risk, and reduce cost.

Several recent analyst reports reinforce the need for an advanced platform for handling increased complexity and enterprise scalability. Forrester looked at a broad view of software and product development challenges across multiple industries to confirm that ELM tools are a viable extension of traditional ALM methods. Check out the Forrester Opportunity Snapshot. And research firm Kisaco named IBM a market leader in engineering lifecycle management tools.

Here are seven reasons why you should consider the IBM ELM suite of tools.

1. Success today comes when teams can access an end-to-end system for managing the entire engineering lifecycle, from requirements management through complete systems design, modeling and testing. IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management tools are the best-in-class for systems engineering, ALM, and DevOps at enterprise scale.
2. With dispersed engineering teams working from home or across geo’s, you need to focus on communication and collaboration and enable engineers to create and track progress across work items according to your team’s Agile, SAFe, or custom processes. IBM ELM gives you the tools to enable consistent work across the entire engineering lifecycle – from requirements to test, workflow management to systems design.
3. In an ever-shifting world, IBM ELM provides flexible change management against a single view of the truth. Whether you’re a software engineer, systems architect, product manager or another player, IBM gives different views and access for different roles, and lets you steer and synch different projects of different pace. Teams get full visibility and traceability between individual requirements to test cases, as well as supporting version and variant management.
4. As a corporate network for all your engineering knowledge, IBM ELM helps your company prepare for the future by building a reusable linked data set. The platform integrates seamlessly with any application that supports OSLC to connect artifacts, giving you the ability to scale your engineering operations to handle more complex projects and improve delivery cycles.
5. IBM ELM enables management of variants and versions of all engineering data, just like source code. You can branch, merge and baseline all engineering data and reuse your changes across variants — improving the productivity, quality, and cost of product development.
6. With predefined industry solutions and innovative features that leverage AI, IBM ELM is adhering to the state of engineering while using tomorrow’s technology today — ensuring our customers are equipped with the tools they need to develop tomorrow’s products in a smarter, safer and more cost-effective way. AI can help you uncover valuable, real-time insights across your engineering data and detect errors earlier in the product lifecycle — before products hit the market, before costly rework and missed schedules derail projects. .
7. Nine out of 10 of the largest automotive companies and 9 out of 10 of the largest pharmaceutical companies trust IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management. And you can see what IDC has to say about IBM and digital transformation in product development, too.

There are a lot ways you can invest in your engineering tools this year, and finding ways to improve productivity and reduce cost should be high on your list. Reach out if you think we can help.

Get the Forrester Opportunity Snapshot