Companies Can't Be Islands
By Ken Amann, Director of Research, CIMdata Inc.

In the past, many manufacturers operated with most everyone in design, production, management, and other areas working in close proximity to one another, often in a single facility under one roof. Today, the trend is toward decentralization, globalization, virtual corporations, strategic relationships, and increased use of supply chains.

Just about every company is part of an extended enterprise, even if they operate locally and work mostly with local firms and their relationships with other organizations are rather informal. Such partnerships are all part of the extended enterprise that generally includes suppliers, customers, subcontractors, and others. These partnerships are becoming critical to business operations for manufacturers to compete. Companies can no longer be islands, no matter what industry they are in, particularly manufacturing companies.

For companies to improve teamwork and efficiency in such dispersed operations, collaboration is key in maintaining the information flow and interaction that is the lifeblood of the enterprise. A variety of technologies are available under this broad umbrella of collaborative tools including synchronous co-modeling systems, visualization software, digital mockup, electronic team rooms, and many others.

For the most part, these tools use web technology and the Internet to allow people in different facilities across town or around the world to interact, resolve problems, reach consensus, and otherwise work together on line. This is much quicker and more effective than telephone conversations, faxes, or mail delivery. And it is much more economical and efficient than getting everyone together for a face-to-face meeting. Collaboration technology is especially useful in integrated product development where designers in different facilities must work on the same project. Working together across an extended enterprises isn't impossible without such tools, but it is certainly less effective and more cumbersome and costly to implement and manage.

The Internet and web-based collaborative technologies certainly enable companies do things faster, drastically compressing time and distance. There are many examples of companies using such tools to resolve problems in minutes or hours that otherwise would require weeks of work in mailing materials, phone calls, or even meetings. One manufacturer at a recent CIMdata conference discussed a design project where two weeks of traditional communication between their US facility and the company's European design center had not produced a solution. A synchronous collaboration co-modeling tool was implemented and a solution was reached in two 30-minute sessions.

As impressive as such time savings are, however, the most far-reaching impact of collaborative technology is that companies can use these tools to change their processes, the way they operate. Collaborative tools can enable major shifts in organizations, workflow, geographic distribution, and relationships between companies. Such changes create new operating paradigms that can dramatically impact and improve business effectiveness. So these technologies are of interest not just to engineers and IT people, but to C-level executive chiefs: the CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, COOs who run companies. They are coming to recognize that collaborative technologies are not just a competitive advantage but rather a competitive necessity for manufacturers to survive in today's fast-moving global market.

Ken Amann is Director of Research at CIMdata Inc., a firm providing strategic consulting and research in collaborative Product Definition management (cPDm) solutions, best practices, and technologies that help companies develop products in the global e-business environment. Contact him at 734-668-9922 or www.CIMdata.com.

CIMdata also provides industry education through international conferences in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, which focus on management of the product or plant definition lifecycle. To learn more about CIMdata and upcoming CIMdata events, please visit www.CIMdata.com