Collaborative Product Engineering for the Enterprise Success
By Sundaresh Shankaran, Engineering Consultant with Infosys Technologies Limited

Traditionally prudent deployments of IT and engineering systems in the enterprises have improved the product design process and operational productivity. They have consistently yielded good results over the years resulting in improved bottom line of many successful manufacturing organizations. Today organizations have realized that this alone is not sufficient to maintain the competitiveness of the organizations in an increasingly challenging market. The only way to retain the market share is to roll out better products ahead of the competition at the cheapest price possible!

Hence many successful companies view their product development process as their greatest competitive advantage. Rapid product development is more important than ever and collaborative product development is enabling these companies to leverage design and manufacturing skills of their business partners to achieve this. Traditional boundaries such as time zones, cultures and enterprises no longer exist. Leveraging design expertise available in various parts of the world provides flexible design capacity that can significantly shorten time to market and reduce product development costs.

Key Drivers
Global competition is one of the key drivers for organizations to adopt Collaborative product development practices. Organizations are keen to take advantage of the diverse global expertise and abundant resources. The key benefits organizations would want to derive are:

• Building innovative products and market them with a short development cycle
• Improved margins by better market share
• Higher product quality with no risk of recall
• Reduction of product development costs
• Up-front integration of customer requirements into product design
• Minimization of engineering changes in the later part of the design cycle

There are ways by which organizations can build the much-needed competitiveness into their products through the product design process:

• Understanding and deployment of the PLM (product lifecycle management) systems
• Deployment of a collaborative product engineering (CPE) practice

Enablers
Internet & Tools

Emergence of Internet technology and advanced tools for remote collaboration has enabled CPE to become a reality and order of the day. Moving away from co-located teams to virtual teams dispersed across the globe in various time zones requires tools for maintaining data integrity, managing communication and conducting design reviews. Complementary IT infrastructure to support these tools and data transfer across networks have made CPE a reality.

• Close Partnership with Engineering Service Providers
  Leveraging the skills of engineering service providers located across the globe is increasingly proving to be a cost effective way of developing products collaboratively. This provides the organization with an opportunity to jointly develop a product taking advantage of the time zone differences and expertise available in low cost economies. This also opens the door for leveraging design expertise available all over the world. This will significantly reduce time for converting an idea to a marketable product.

  Time zone differences lead to extended workday, thereby compressing the product development time. A number of design alternatives can be evaluated in a shorter time frame, resulting in a robust and reliable product.

• Framework & Methodology
  Robust processes and frameworks are to be put in place for successful product development to happen collaboratively. Tight integration of people, tools and capabilities will go a long way in achieving success.

  Communication channels have to be planned and structured. Design teams will have to learn to manage their communication effectively in the absence of face-face communications. Building trust and motivating dispersed teams is a challenge, which needs attention. Design teams will have to have higher levels of discipline for operating seamlessly.

  Project planning and tracking, configuration management and change management processes have to be robust and happen in a virtual environment. Project has to be highly visible for all team members. Easy access to schedules, action items, project-documents, project meeting minutes, design review decisions and issues will be essential.

Aspects that need attention:
Engineering Process

Companies need to review their engineering processes for new product introduction, engineering change management and re-engineer them to suit the collaborative way of managing product development. This would increase the efficiency of these processes and also ensure geographically dispersed teams can participate in these workflows seamlessly.

Culture
One of the biggest obstacles in reaping the benefits of CPE is the culture of the all the players. Many companies tend to downplay its importance, as a result of which the benefits of collaboration are not fully achieved. For effective collaboration all the participants across the value chain have to share their ideas in real time and should be open to criticism.

Lack of face-to-face communications
Frequent and rich information transfer that was possible with face-to-face communication will no longer be possible. This shortcoming has to be overcome by designing structured communication channels. Framework for fast acknowledgement of each communication and commitment for the action are to be put in place. All project related information such as project objectives and goals, schedules, meeting minutes, project metrics, repositories of knowledge, etc. are made highly visible and easily accessible.

Project leaders have to go an extra mile to build and sustain trust and teamwork among dispersed product design teams. Arranging for regular videoconferences, chat sessions and other meeting sessions are some of the ways to achieve this.

Conclusion
Collaborative product development is becoming a new way of doing business and is fast emerging as a business practice. Shift from traditional co-located environment to collaborative product engineering has tremendous opportunities for reducing time to market, reducing product development costs, leveraging design skills and expertise available across the globe to build better products. Technology and tools available in the market are mature and deployable. Success of CPE depends on the right choice of tools, right choice of partners and ability to motivate and manage multi-cultural teams across the globe.