Many people think that the key to creating new products and services is immaculate data, and while it’s important, it’s not always a means to an end. If product managers can’t answer the most common question they receive—“How long until it’s ready?”—it indicates a gap in process. With the Jeeves Product Management application area, you can set up the workflows you need to build products and services, from planning and design through QA and testing. You can then infuse those workflows with meaningful, enterprise-wide data that will help you make informed decisions and move products through the lifecycle faster.

Jeeves Product Management contains a number of features that help product managers ensure product profitability and identify areas for improvement. On top of these features, Jeeves’ genius architecture allows the system to fit the complexities and processes that make your organization unique, allowing product managers to:

  • Manage and track a global product and service portfolio sold into multiple geographies.
  • Create custom workflows that match existing feedback management and R&D processes, while capturing meaningful operational metrics.
  • Add checklists or custom fields that track critical product data, such as package dimensions, colors, weights, or barcodes, as well as design your own reports.
  • Search on any field, or any data point, to quickly answer questions.

 


 

Key Features

Product Master

The Jeeves Product Management application area offers an incredibly flexible product master that can handle any combination of products and services, including finished, semi-manufactured, components, raw materials, packaging, consumables, stocked/non-stocked, field service, installation service and more. Products can be classified according to classes, accounts, groups, categories or types at either the product or item level, ensuring that product managers can review costs and pricing in the most meaningful way. Products also can carry key statuses and fields, allowing you to keep track of what’s available to use, quote and sell versus what is discontinued, or any other information you choose to monitor.

Attribute Management

Product and service managers can define product attributes as standalone objects, and then assign them to products at the item, component or routing level. Often, a product's quality varies over time and these characteristics or attributes need to be part of the product's inventory definition. Attributes can describe a visual appearance or how to visually inspect a product, define how to measure a product, or act as a checklist or stages of a process. Attributes make it possible to report on these product-related objects, in order to do things like trace historical status and values or make on-the-job process approvals. The Jeeves Product Management application area can support as many specific attributes you need and will be carried forward as you upgrade your system over time.  

Variant Management

The Jeeves variant management feature helps companies that sell products in variants quickly and efficiently obtain inventory balances, as well as understand item availability in response to customer demands. Examples of such industries are apparel (quality, color and sizes), shoes (sizes and colors), furniture (colors, fabrics, materials), and construction (material and lengths). In the Jeeves variant management feature, all attributes are connected to a master item, and with the help of a matrix, each variant item cab be managed uniquely by the system, making it easy to retrieve sales statistics or purchasing suggestions at the variant level. Jeeves variant management also has built-in features to help you manage item seasonality, surpluses, and shortages.

Costing and Routing

Analyzing product costs is one of the most important aspects of product management. For a true picture of the profitability of a product or line, product managers need detailed costing data. Jeeves ERP offers a highly flexible platform for tracking product costs, starting with actual or calculated costs down to the component level. You can set up manufacturing costs and overhead in a number of ways, factoring in setup time, run time, fixed and variable labor, and more. In addition, you can connect subcontracted costs from different locations or suppliers, adjusting for specific currencies or start/setup costs. Routings, which can be predefined or chosen after the order has been taken, can be controlled per plant/line to handle varying costs, allowing for an easy view of costs by invent tory location.

Revision Control

Jeeves revision control helps you visually track and compare current and new product and service revisions. The feature allows product managers to modify item master data without affecting the currently approved revision, in order to move through the analysis and approval process faster. Revision control allows for adjustments to documents, routings, BOMs, attributes, supplier records, and more, with all changes summarized using color coding. When changes are made for a new revision, product managers can easily estimate costs and pricing or run an assembly analysis report—or go straight to kicking off the approval workflow.

Workflow Management

With workflow management, you will learn how long it takes to launch a product, and become much more comfortable answering that ever-present question, “When will it be ready?” The Jeeves workflow management toolset will help you stop managing processes using email, and start using business process management to distribute assignments, track deadlines, and review the status of deliverables.

Document Management

The product data management application area comes with powerful electronic document management (EDM) functionality, allowing product managers the ability to track and manage revisions for key documents, such as product collateral, recipes, or production orders, as well as link them to key processes and transactions within the Jeeves ERP system. Documents can be viewed, checked in and checked out based on role-based permissions, ensuring the most current approved version is always accessible.

Projects

The Jeeves Product Management module allows you to create projects that will tie all costs together, from creation to repair. With the project functionality, you can follow up on sales costs, R&D costs, purchasing costs, RMA costs, and more, and gain a complete view of whether or not the product or service is profitable.

Master Data Management

The Jeeves master data management feature is ideal for companies that need to manage data that changes across companies, business units, or locations. The tools helps product managers control data that needs to be updated and managed centrally, as well as generate conversions for data that varies by site and rules for what data can be updated or changed and by who. With master data management, product and service managers can be more confident in the information they’re using to make decisions.

Integrations and Additive Solutions

Jeeves ERP can be extended by a number of integrations and additive solutions—some built by Jeeves; others built in partnership with leading software providers; and still others custom-built by our product experts leveraging the system’s open architecture and service builder tool. Additive application areas include Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).