Virtual Collaboration in a Global Enterprise
David Prawel, Longview Advisors Inc.

Competition is really tough out there. Competitive pressures drive innovation and demand quality, while increasingly complex products have led manufacturers to depend on global business partners for critical components. To win, manufacturers need to develop new products and bring them to market faster than ever before. According to AMR Research, twenty to thirty percent of all sales by industrial companies come from products that have been on the market for less than five years.

Success depends on operational excellence and efficiency in business processes that integrate global customers and partners directly into highly complex, cooperative product development processes.

The secret sauce, regardless of these potential barriers, is effective communication and collaboration. Indeed, success depends on how well business partners share knowledge and information, while reacting to changes in design and process, regardless of geographic location. Seamless flow of information enables all stakeholders in the value chain to collaborate - a prerequisite to productivity in global manufacturing. A recent report from Aberdeen Group (www.aberdeen.com) found that best-in-class companies -- those that meet time-to-market, cost reduction, revenue, and quality targets 80% to 100% of the time -- engage in more forms of collaboration; work with more external partners; and use more specialized collaborative PLM tools -- across the product lifecycle.

PLM is a strategic approach to implementing processes and technology to help companies manage products from concept through retirement. By standardizing approaches to creation, management and deployment of product-related information, PLM enables global stakeholders to make faster, more informed decisions, based on relevant, accurate information. Furthermore, the process of standardizing PLM workflows enables continuous improvement of those same processes.

But people can’t work together if they can’t share their product knowledge and data. This presents a huge impediment to effective collaboration and PLM, and the business of manufacturing as a whole.

Communication & Collaboration
Effective collaboration is key to world-class manufacturing and innovation. A recent survey of 650 manufacturing executives by Industry Week (www.industryweek.com) highlights the mission-critical nature of collaboration. Sixty-two percent of purchasing executives listed supplier collaboration as the most effective contributor to increased profitability and reduced cost. More than 97 percent of product development executives selected collaboration with customers as the most effective strategy for meeting customer requirements and bringing innovative products to market. And, greater than 35 percent chose collaboration with customers as the key strategy to reducing product development time to market.

Manufacturers spend a lot of money creating valuable product data assets, but the clear advantages of collaboration can’t be realized if the data isn’t available to stakeholders who could benefit from it. Efficient manufacturing processes depend upon sharing product data - 2D and 3D CAD data and documentation of all kinds - throughout the globally extended enterprise. But this isn’t easy.

The challenges and difficulties of sharing engineering knowledge and information are well known and publicized. Few single issues present a more formidable impediment to accelerating product time-to-market. Studies have suggested that the cost of poor CAD interoperability to the automobile industry alone could be more than $10 billion per year worldwide. And the recent highly visible problems at Airbus provide a glaring example of what can happen if interoperability issues are not considered early in design. Their unfortunate stumble has already cost them more than $30 billion and some very high level executive jobs. The bright side, if there is one, is the wake up call this issue has given to high level executives throughout manufacturing on the risk and potential cost of poor interoperability.

A large portion of the blame goes to incompatible formats between CAD systems, but another huge limitation results from people and process issues. For example, CAD users each have their own preferred techniques when using their CAD systems. When they share their CAD files with others, it is often impossible to determine design intent, or modify the CAD data without creating problems. The most common solution is to re-create some or all of the data. Access problem also plague productivity. A typical global manufacturing value chain could have as many as 1,000 potential users who could benefit from their company’s product data, but simply can’t access it or lack the tools or expertise to use it.

Many multi-format CAD model “viewers” are available to help non-CAD professionals access and use their 3D product data. Actify and Informative Graphics, for example, provide multi-format viewing products that enable non-CAD users to access, view and markup dozens of 3D formats.

New “light-weight” file formats such as Dassault’s 3DXML and Adobe’s Acrobat 3D have emerged to help make 3D product data more broadly available. Furthermore, 3D applications such as Enovia DMU and 3D Virtools from Dassault promise to deliver profound new levels of 3D functionality and usability.

Standardization
Successful PLM implementation depends on the definition of common processes and workflows, and the standardization and implementation of these processes across the enterprise.

The techniques and methods companies use to develop and launch products often comprise the core of their intellectual property and competitive advantage. They have been developed over years of experience, usually long before CAD and computing technology arrived on the scene. Each company has its preferred approach to the products it builds. Even within the same company, divisions and geographies have built specific methods of running their business around these highly complex and specialized processes.

Reaching agreement on which processes and workflows are best for the enterprise as a whole is a truly daunting task. It requires high level executive visibility and leadership. But PLM can’t be successful until these processes are standardized. It will take extra time to design, document and implement standardized processes, but the payoff will be huge.

PLM is tough stuff. It requires communication, collaboration and standardization, and these are not easy things to do. People, process and technology hurdles have to be overcome. But in the end, it is management’s role to accept and build these factors into product launch plans, or PLM, and continuous improvement, will forever only be nice concepts.

David Prawel is founder and president of Longview Advisors, Inc., a global consulting firm focusing on 3D software technology in the manufacturing industry.
www.longviewadvisors.com, www.3Dubiquity.com (blog).