The Importance of Collaboration to All Organizations

A key enabler of Product Lifecycle Management is Collaborative Product Design (CPD). AMR Research in their whitepaper The Value of PLM and How to Get It identified CPD as one of the 5 core pillars of PLM. So what is it that makes collaboration so important?

It is a combination of a few things. In part, as tools like CATIA have become more sophisticated and CATIA Operators more skilled, there has been a tendency towards more siloed behavior. Gary Mintchell of Automation World calls this ‘cocooning’. Collaboration facilitates communication across the silo boundaries between the various stakeholders in the design process more dynamically and less formally. Another factor that makes collaboration ever more important is the accelerating product cycle process. As Time-To-Market windows shrink, the ability to integrate and finalize changes earlier in the design process becomes mandatory.

Reduced to the basics, the driving force behind collaboration is the need for manufacturers and product designers to make informed decisions about the design and manufacturing of their products. All manufacturers face the challenge of making informed decisions about their products. What varies is the scope of the decision. For any decision to be an informed decision the scope of knowledge has to exceed the scope of the decision, otherwise aspects of that decision are simply Best Guesses. So as the scope of the decision changes (do we change who is sourcing the LEDs for our device vs. do we build a new class of aircraft) so does the scope of information that must be marshaled, organized and reviewed as part of the decision making process.

For collaboration this means that if you are one of the Big Three automakers or a commercial jet airline builder, you will need some very heavy duty capabilities in your Collaborative Produce Design solution. On the other hand, if you have a more limited product and production line, significantly simpler solutions can go a long way towards addressing your decision making needs.

Data vs. Information

The process of making an informed decision has been modeled as a pyramid built on data.

Data is the transactional, incremental physical records of your daily business. In and of itself data isn’t that useful. It must be organized into information to be useful. According to Working Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 1999), information is data that has been contextualized, categorized, often calculated (from component data), corrected, and usually condensed. Information has patterns within it and is sometimes useful for tactical and process driven responses, but the context of those responses can only be formed based on knowledge.

Knowledge provides the next step of data organization. For information to become knowledge, the context of the information needs to include predictive capabilities. It is with the predictive capabilities of knowledge that informed decisions can be made. The more complex and voluminous your underlying data sets are, the more effort is required in progressively organizing it to become knowledge useful in making decisions about your business.

Digital Data

Computers are particularly good at tracking large volumes of data as well as in executing structured and repetitive tasks. Much of the effort involved in organizing data into information and structuring information into knowledge is repetitive, structured and involves large amounts of data. So the first step in using collaborative processes in your manufacturing business is to move to using Digital Data.

Digital Data can be as simple and limited as using Windows Notepad for taking notes. It can be as sophisticated as tracking all documents and processes using a highly customized tool from a major PLM vendor. Our focus in this paper is on the fundamental types of Digital Data that most manufacturers are already collecting and how they apply to the PLM process.

One thing to keep in mind that is not inherently obvious when talking about digital data is that capturing and managing business processes digitally is itself a form of digital data

Core Components of PLM

According to The Meta Group, the core process components of the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) are: Plan, Design, Procure, Produce, Service and Retire. Almost all manufacturing operations, no matter their size, implement these processes. Digital technology has brought powerful tools to each of these disciplines. The challenge has been that as each of these disciplines has adopted these tools, they have progressively become more isolated. The design engineers use tools that are different than those used by procurement, and factory floor automation uses a completely different set of tools. The challenge PLM faces is to break through the bubbles that envelop each of these disciplines. Collaboration offers that capability.

Collaboration Basics

Data Authoring

Let’s briefly look at some of the tools and digital documents being used in these disciplines:

• Project proposals are often written in Microsoft Word
• Project Planning uses electronic planning tools like Microsoft Project
• Design Calculations are done using spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel
• Initial technical documents and process flows are often created using technical drawing tools like Visio.
• Designers use a variety of CAD tools to create the underlying designs.
• Older paper drawing based designs are scanned into formats like TIFF
• From these, electronic Bills Of Material are often detailed using tools like Microsoft Excel

Data Exchange

Once these documents are created they typically are shared in some manner. The traditional approach has been to print out the relevant documents and physically deliver them their consumers. More and more they are shared using:

• Electronic Mail
• Document sharing and Instant Messaging tools like MSN Instant Messenger
• File shares
• Instant Team sites such as those available using Windows Sharepoint Services on Windows 2003 Server

Data Organization

As we can see, for the majority of manufacturing enterprises, the basic requirement imposed by collaboration in the electronic age – the necessity for Digital Data – is already being met. For the most part though it is an ad-Hoc process, fraught with possibilities for errors introduced by transcription, misrouted documents and version conflicts.

• Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) - Windows SharePoint Services is a Windows Server 2003 component that enables the creation Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Team sites based on Windows SharePoint Services, called SharePoint sites, take file storage to a new level and help create communities for team collaboration. Users can collaborate on documents, tasks, and events and easily share contacts and other information. In addition, Windows SharePoint Services makes it easy for managers of teams and sites to manage site content and user activity. The environment is designed for flexible deployment, administration, and application development. Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS)
  
• Microsoft Desktop Engine - Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE 2000) is the free, redistributable version of SQL Server that’s ideal for client applications that require an embedded database, new developers learning how to build data-driven applications, and Web sites serving up to 25 concurrent users. Partners such as Autodesk have built solutions for lightweight document vaulting on MSDE. Microsoft Desktop Engine
• InfoPath - Recent versions of Microsoft Office enhance these basic documents with schema driven data capture and rendering with tools like InfoPath. Infopath provides an easy way to organize common data from multiple sources into a richer Office™ document. It also helps reduce data capture and transcription errors through structured forms creation.

These three tools allow you to take the collection of data in your organization and:

• Provide a context for it by bringing related data together in a single WSS team site.
• Multiple team sites add a level of categorization not available from a simple set of file shares, as does the versioning that WSS provides.
• Collaboration via IM on the documents in a WSS site facilitates correction of any spurious data
• Tools like Excel and Project allow you to collate, roll up and otherwise condense and calculate the data
• Infopath facilitates organizing and condensing the data from disparate sources.
• Infopath also facilitates moving data straight from the collaboration sites to data vaults like MSDE without the risk of transcription errors.

So these tools, taken together allow you to take your data and transform it into Information – the first step up the Pyramid of knowledge and a significant step along the path towards PLM.

IT Infrastructure

So far we have looked at what are the basic capabilities that are available when data becomes digital and the client tools that can transform this data into information. But what about the IT infrastructure required to run these tools? As we discussed earlier, most manufacturing organizations already have the client tools in place. That means that most of the IT infrastructure to transforming data into information is also in place. The pieces needed to implement the above are:

• Microsoft Windows XP
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003
• Basic Email (Microsoft Exchange 2003, Hotmail or similar)
• Instant Messaging (MSN Messenger, Exchange Instant Messenger or similar)
• Windows Sharepoint Services for Windows 2003 Server
• Internet Explorer
• .NET Framework

Most of what is required is a focus on identifying and organizing the existing bits of data into useful information. This might require the creation of some custom Infopath templates for Word and Excel. It also might require setting up a server to support the team collaboration sites and the document vaulting. Overall though, the changes are primarily ones of process rather than deployment of major components:

1. Bring as much of the data as feasible into the digital domain
2. Set up WSS or MSDE storage servers to vault/archive the digital data
3. Deploy additional collaboration tools such as Instant Messenger as needed
4. Create collaboration portals using WSS to facilitate more rapid and easy collaboration.

Stepping Up to Collaboration Basics – Information into Knowledge

So we have seen how the basic tools available from Microsoft can move you from collecting and managing data, to interacting with information. Information by itself though, isn’t sufficient for decision making. The next critical step is to transform that information into knowledge because it is knowledge that is key to making informed decisions.

A more succinct way of describing the process of organizing, abstracting and collating information is the term “Information Strategy”. We started off this discussion by pointing out that Collaboration is a core strategy for PLM. As we see from the above, most organizations have the basic building blocks for Collaborative Product Development already in place

Information Strategy

An Information Strategy is no more and no less than that. It is a strategic vision of what information you have, and how to go about sifting through it to identify patterns that in turn can be used to predict future trends or events. And it is this prediction that facilitates decision making.

For smaller organizations, simply having the data condensed into useful information is often a sufficient step to recognize significant incremental benefits. Add to that a means to facilitate collaboration beyond the bubble of each PLM discipline, and the participants in the collaboration will begin to identify the patterns and trends that transform information into knowledge.

For larger organizations, formalizing broader access to this information is the key next step. As the amount of information grows tools for searching and organizing this data beyond the basics discussed in this paper become important. The more flexibly you can search current and past information, the more likely you are to be able to identify longer term patterns and trends.

Some of the tools that provide these additional capabilities are:

• Sharepoint Portal Server (SPS) – in conjunction with extensible search capabilities that provide Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in binary TIFF files, SPS provides a more robust collaboration portal that supports multi-site deployments
• Enterprise Project Management Server (EPM) – provides the repository for enterprise wide project and resource planning. This is a key component in Product Portfolio Management since it allows resourcing tradeoff analysis to be made between projects
• Biztalk Server 2004 (BTS) – Provides data transformation capabilities as well as the facility to begin to bring your business processes into the world of Digital Data.
• How to take the step to the next category of PLM complexity is the subject of a follow on whitepaper.

Summary

We have seen that the CPD core of PLM is not just a solution for The Big Guys but rather it is a set of Information Strategies that applies to anyone managing design and manufacturing data in a digital format.

We have also seen that many of the normal business tools that are part of, or extensions to Microsoft Office 2003, are the building blocks of an electronic CPD process. The key to tying these together is a combination of data organization and abstraction, and enhanced collaboration on the resulting digital information.

The first steps of this process of CPD adoption are ones you probably already have taken: Move your data to the digital domain, and begin to organize, categorize and vault the types of data you have using tools like Infopath and MSDE.

From there, by thinking about how best to leverage technology such as SPS, Instant Messenger and even Outlook to enhance the collaborative processes you are already using. Then take a step back and evaluate where your successes are, and where you would like to focus to gain even better results.