FeaturePlan enables Autodesk to manage customer expectations for future product requirements.
Montreal, Quebec – December 06, 2004 – Ryma Technology Solutions Inc., the first company to deliver an Enterprise Product Management (EPM) solution for Product Managers that employs best practices from the Pragmatic Marketing® Framework, announced today that Autodesk's Manufacturing Solutions Division based in Portland, Oregon, have chosen FeaturePlan™ to help them manage their product requirements, information gathering and product planning for the Product Management team.
The software solutions provided by Autodesk's Manufacturing Solution Division enable manufacturing customers to rapidly adopt 3D design, create designs in a comprehensive 2D/3D environment, and manage and share design data across the enterprise and with the supply chain. The division's principal product offerings include: Autodesk Inventor® Series, Autodesk Inventor® Professional, AutoCAD® Mechanical, AutoCAD® Electrical, Autodesk® Vault, Autodesk® Productstream™, and Autodesk Streamline®.
The Challenge: Managing market and customer information
Prior to implementing FeaturePlan, the product management team in the Manufacturing Solutions Division was manually managing worldwide product demands, including customer expectations for new and innovative functionality, enhancement requests, and win/loss reports and other information collected during customer interactions. With an increasing number of software products, they used a variety of home-grown, discrete systems across the company with no product-management-specific application to manage the information going to these systems.
The Solution
"When we looked for a product management solution, our key requirements were the ability to manage diverse customer and sales inputs including wish-list items and win/loss data in a manner that enabled us to document customer personas and lead the company with market facts," explains Andy Palioca, Product Manager for Autodesk. "FeaturePlan was the only product we evaluated that has allowed us to stage our implementation and has provided us with incremental benefits from the get-go."
The Benefits
Autodesk employed an extensive evaluation process and found that FeaturePlan met all of their requirements. With FeaturePlan, Autodesk's product management team is able to efficiently focus on customer problems and persona and communicate this information to the product design team. With FeaturePlan's broad ability to capture all types of market inputs and problem statements, the product managers in Autodesk's Manufacturing Solutions Division are able to fully research their customers and share this information within their product management team and other company stakeholders quickly using FeaturePlan's built-in reports generation system.
In the future, new product managers will also enjoy a single resource which has captured historical market and customer information allowing them to make product decisions based on a long history of market facts. This will also make is easy to identify trends, efficiently understand critical problems and isolate specific functional areas of the product for further study.
"After implementing FeaturePlan we are able to better manage the planning cycle and track who made a product request and then close the loop as to the status of that request," stated Jeff Wymer, Product Manager, Autodesk Inventor. "We determine priorities based on market and customer facts, rather than opinions. Along with FeaturePlan being easy to setup and integrate with our in-house portal, we appreciated the Webforms capabilities that allow the input of product enhancements and call reports from the field... a real time saver!"
"We are pleased that Autodesk’s Manufacturing Solutions Division has chosen FeaturePlan as their Enterprise Product Management solution to enable them to consolidate their market and customer information," stated Rene Bellei, Chief Executive Officer of Ryma Technology Solutions. "Clearly, after such a rigorous evaluation, Autodesk have chosen the only solution that can provide their Product Management team the capability to manage their products effectively and allow them to phase in their implementation so they can experience an immediate productivity impact on their Product Management process."
About Ryma Technology Solutions, Inc.
Ryma Technology Solutions Inc. is the first company to deliver a solution for Product Managers that employs best practices from the Pragmatic Marketing Framework. Dedicated to breaking new ground, Ryma’s flagship product, FeaturePlan, allows product managers to utilize a repeatable process to gather requirements, quantify problems and create market driven solutions effectively and efficiently in an intuitive, collaborative environment. Ryma also provides a full range of professional services that assist organizations in implementing market-driven best practices for their product management team. Headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Ryma Technology Solutions is led by an experienced management team and serves a rapidly expanding customer base
