One key positive outcome is the ability to generate key performance indicators, which were practically unheard of with paper. "With an electronic system we can start generating metrics and now we do it weekly," Barnes says. "The project manager sets weekly targets for his group. He generates a standard report showing all outstanding tasks, who is assigned to each and when they were assigned the task. His target is to have less than 100 active tasks at any time and for people to have their task for no longer than 10 days. With this focus they have reviewed around 50 documents in two weeks. In a paper system you can't do that."

According to Evans, the PLM initiative has been a showcase project because of the way it was run and the communication with the business units. "In a sense you don't want to do these big projects too frequently but it was a success," she says. "In principle we could do another transformation but it has made us look more closely at what could be digitized."

With more employees asking to have the same workflow and visibility they get out of electronic PLM applied to other processes, Cochlear is now rapidly sifting through areas of its business that will benefit from more modern information management systems. Later this year the company will migrate about 150GB of CAD data from four databases into Windchill and its next big target is an Oracle manufacturing implementation due to go live in August, which will replace a 20-year-old Maxim system. "We are injecting a lot of money into that and there will be no integration work until after August, but absolutely we will look at integrating Windchill with Oracle," Barnes says. "We will just look at text file integration." This will ensure independence between the two systems and there is no requirement to pull information in real time as the maintenance requirements of such a system were deemed too high for the potential gain.

While Cochlear may not be creating any more paper documents for product development, there is other information, like policy and procedure information, that is not going into the PLM system. Instead, the company intends to wrap up disparate information sources into a global intranet.