Preparing a Company's Infrastructure for a Collaborative Environment
by Phil Harrison, LionHeart Solutions Inc.

Many COE member companies are multi-national organizations with engineering and manufacturing operations around the globe. Adding to the complexity, most if not all-major companies in the automotive, ship building and aerospace industries have teamed with partners to risk share. In order to meet the shared project goals on quality, delivery and cost these partners must collaborate on a daily basis to share the same product data and be able to communicate effectively. Without an effective management system barriers can be created which can be just as disruptive as language and time zone barriers.

The tools by which the company's products are developed are dependant on a foundation. This foundation consists of three factors:

• Infrastructure Level
• Application Level
• Process and Method Level

Let's briefly review the contents of each component.

Infrastructure refers to the hardware, software and software distribution, data and data access, as well as user support. Do all of your operations and partners share the same vision for use of your design and manufacturing tools? Can users in all operations access the same information in a timely manner without resorting to translating data or physical media? If they don't, an examination of methods used in these operations will no doubt show significant non-value added activity. Is your data protected so that the people that need to access the information can access it in a timely manner, while blocking people that do not need access?

At the application level special consideration must be given to performance of the application. If application performance is slow, users will become frustrated and be less likely to use the tools and methods that were designed for the project.

In several instances we have heard of companies setting up subsidiary companies on a different continent and sending hardware and software, while the design and manufacturing teams are often trained in the specific software tools, the engineering staffs may not be trained in the company's methodologies, nor are the users adequately supported.

Processes and methods that are used should take into account the whole product introduction and support cycle. A view of the product design that may be adequate in engineering will not be adequate in manufacturing, where a manufacturing engineer needs to view product data along with tooling data. Thus the product data management system should be designed such that information can be retrieved in a view specific to the domain of the requestor.

A review of the tools used in manufacturing plants often highlights that communication methods with shop floor employees, staffs in procurement and vendors are often limited to 2D prints, yet attention to these areas can lead to very significant cycle time reductions. Using 3D design data as the communication medium has yielded tremendous improvements in the design engineering community yet has often not adequately been implemented in the manufacturing and supplier community. Recently introduced Web-enabled applications now enable personnel in these communities to review and collaborate with inexpensive hardware.

Putting the right tools and infrastructure in place can enable your enterprise, whether the participants in the production introduction process are in the same building or geographically dispersed across the globe.

Phil Harrison and Paul Barilovits of BMW Manufacturing will be reviewing how BMW Manufacturing addressed each of these areas in a semi-general session at the upcoming COE conference in Palm Springs, CA, April 14-17th.