The Value of your Intellectual Property
By Bill Abramson, President, Abramson CAD/CAM Technology, Inc

Have you heard that if you are maintaining the status quo, you are really falling behind? Do you feel that the deployment of the latest and greatest technology you will maximize your enterprise's competitive advantage? I would suggest to you that even if I owned a really fantastic set of carpentry tools, I still would be unable to build anything of substance. The darn things do not seem to operate by themselves. Not only won't they operate independently, they require an operator that has some expertise. Now if I were in my fully equipped workshop armed with a project, where would I get the expertise to get the job done right? Not from the instruction manual. I could call a friend who knew what they were doing. Well, isn't that similar to what we do in industry? As a designer, wouldn't I call a manufacturing engineer to get the 'straight scoop' regarding the manufacturability of my proposed design? Wouldn't I call the analysis guru to advise me regarding the feasibility of my proposed design? Well, if lots of folks did that our corporate gurus would be spending all of their time consulting. In doing that, each individual would be limited as to how many people they could help. They are also limited to providing advice to the hours that they are available. Is that the intended allocation of their expertise? I would think that is not the case. Your corporation's high-level expertise should be allocated to the very complex and unique challenges, not the mundane. So what should we do?

Well, I would submit to you that the differentiator between you and your competition is not in the fantastic technology that you have deployed, but it resides in the intellectual property of your teams. After all, if the majority of enterprises within your vertical are using the same tools, they should be exactly even in their competitive ratings. We know that is not true! Therefore, the answer is to clone all of our top minds and distribute them to the projects. There is a way to accomplish this. Store your enterprise corporate knowledge, including corporate standards and best practices, into a knowledge-based system that completely integrates with your PLM system. Make sure to maintain this knowledge-based system to reflect changes in expertise, standards or application software releases. Educate and encourage your teams to use these systems. After all is said and done, these electronic intellectuals are available to everyone 24/7. They do not take vacations or breaks. This paradigm enables your high level experts to focus on those challenges that really require their skills and where their solutions will really make a difference. It will, also, enable the rest of the project teams to focus on what they do best and produce a higher quality design.

Your teams will truly become lean mean fighting machines who will be proud of themselves!