Santa Clara, CA August 6, 2002 Alventive, a provider of product collaboration solutions focused on discrete manufacturers and their supply chains, has released version 4.0 of its product suite, adding an enhanced project framework for program management and other new capabilities aimed at helping dispersed teams get new products to market faster.
Alventive's flagship suite includes Project Navigator, Quick Collaboration, PreSourcing Collaboration and Design Process Collaboration.
The solution provider said the new features in release 4.0 will make it easier for globally dispersed and outsourced product teams to introduce products under increasing time, cost and quality pressures.
Key new capabilities include an enhanced project framework for program management; the ability to create, assign, edit and manage "action items" across multiple programs; and "My Dashboard," which provides at-a-glance access to all project tasks and their priorities.
Enhanced collaboration and online meeting capabilities in Quick Conferencing can facilitate decision-making and complex data information sharing, Alventive asserts, while new interactive Gantt charts can facilitate real-time planning. Release 4.0 also adds support for Sun Solaris 2.7 and 2.8 operating systems, Netscape Navigator 6.2x, and Kanji language.
Kevin O'Marah, an analyst with technology consultancy AMR Research, in reviewing the 4.0 release, noted that the new version has added substantial functionality for the product, process and project layers of a group design effort. "By making it relatively simple to use and focusing on the day-to-day problems of engineers and designers working together to get products to market, Alventive gives users a sound, incremental approach to the product lifecycle management (PLM) problem," O'Marah wrote in a recent AMR Research Alert.
Learn more about collaborative product design in "The Collaboration Question," in the May 2001 issue of iSource Business (
