In the past, most product design activities were performed in centralized engineering departments, often with people seated side-by-side working on the same projects. Communication was direct and problems could be resolved quickly. In some cases, only one person was responsible for the entire design of a particular product. Over the past several years, that type of working arrangement has disappeared as many companies have moved toward greater use of design chains, where products are developed in multi-disciplinary teams with members often coming from separate groups within the company as well as suppliers, partners, co-developers, and others in the extended enterprise.

With product development teams distributed among multiple companies, communication, coordination of activities, and the ability to collaborate become essential. In this arrangement, product design may occur around the clock and even around the world, with hand-offs from North America to Asia to Europe. In this way, today’s extended enterprises leverage the capabilities of suppliers and other partner organizations to build on each company’s strengths. Separate groups often resort to e-mail and telephone communications, faxed drawings, and travel—all of which are imperfect methods of communicating. If organizations limit their communications to paper exchanges or unstructured electronic messages and attachments, people can take days to receive the correct information, thus adding numerous delays in the product development cycle.

PLM Enables Effective Collaboration

To overcome these barriers and reach the required level of communication, companies are implementing collaboration processes as a fundamental component within their overall environment for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)—a business strategy to more effectively support the full lifecycle of a company’s products with processes that enable collaboration along the full lifecycle and across partner networks, technologies that support product and process development, and processes that foster innovation at all stages. Within PLM, collaboration becomes a key element in managing product definition: part geometries, product configurations, technical specifications, analysis results, workflow, change orders, etc. Product definition is regarded as a valuable intellectual asset that extends throughout the entire lifecycle of the product (from concept through obsolescence). The product definition has a lifecycle that is critical to manage effectively. Through PLM approaches, product definition is closely integrated with production and operations support, and there is a continuous interaction throughout the product lifecycle to provide effective information to people in all roles throughout the extended enterprise.

In such an approach, collaboration benefits companies on many different levels. Individual users are provided a consistent data source to the full product definition, a powerful search facility, access to corporate knowledge, and links to other people throughout the extended enterprise. Organizational efficiency and effectiveness are improved by facilitating corporate communications and collaborative teamwork. For the most part, these tools use Web technology to allow people in different facilities across town or around the world to interact, resolve problems, reach consensus, and otherwise work together on line. Collaboration technology is especially useful in integrated product development where designers in different facilities must work on the same project. For companies to embrace the full potential of a distributed design chain, they need collaborative tools to manage data and processes and serve as an informational bridge connecting different groups of the extended enterprise. Collaborative tools are particularly useful in unambiguously exchanging and discussing designs that often are developed on different systems across the design chain.

Impressive Savings

Collaborative tools have been used to resolve problems in a few minutes that otherwise would have required days of time in travel (or may have gone unresolved) because of difficulties in conveying ideas through discussion or sending documents and data back and forth. In this way, collaborative tools provide significant time-savings benefits in streamlining and accelerating a variety of processes throughout the enterprise.

Adopting a design review and change management process where project teams in different sites use collaborative tools can result in significant benefits by identifying interferences, evaluating various alternatives, pinpointing potential problems, or otherwise visualizing what one another are talking about on the overall design. Such PLM-enabled design release and engineering change workflows may result in faster, lower-cost design processes—reducing the cost of engineering changes by from 10 to 90%. Overall, resolving problems up front in development allow design changes to made early in development versus later in the cycle when remedies are much more time-consuming and expensive to execute.

CIMdata has observed through research with companies that have implemented PLM that better management of design supply chain collaboration processes can reduce product design efforts by 10 to 45%, better standard parts management can lower inventory costs by 5 to 25%, and more accurate and managed bill of materials (BOMs) and configurations ensure downstream quality and in this way increase product quality metrics by 10 to 85%. Although the actual benefits for all organizations vary based upon a wide range of factors, these are examples of the kinds of benefits that are well worth pursuing.

Top-Down Push for Change

Deploying collaborative tools in an organization requires technical issues to be considered, of course, including required computer and network infrastructure, software and security. But these issues often pale in comparison to organizational problems companies face in implementing collaborative technologies. Often, firms must reorient their work culture to be more flexible and cooperative, work needs to become more focused on processes and less on tasks, management must concentrate more on teams and less on departments, decision processes should be decentralized and employees more empowered. These types of changes can cause considerable turmoil and organizational conflict that typically requires dedicated commitment and involvement from top executives to overcome.