Improving Global Design Collaboration

Maturity levels help show the collaboration gap between the current as-is state – and the ideal to be state – with the partner.

PTC's Collaboration Framework.In a recent survey of executives at worldwide manufacturing companies, more than 44% of respondents stated that globalizing key business functions was one of their top three corporate initiatives – up from just 28% the year before. The one function that is being targeted most is Global Design Collaboration.

Today, industrial manufacturers are looking to improve collaboration with external partners in order to gain benefits in market share, profitability and time-to-market. However, many industrial manufacturers find that they are unable to gain the ROI from design outsourcing that they anticipate.

It is possible to improve the collaborative processes in design outsourcing by following some best practice guidelines. Learning industry-proven methods can improve the global collaborative design processes and help deliver faster time-to-market, increased productivity and lower costs.

Growing Footprint
For most aerospace and defense manufacturers, relying on globally-dispersed teams has become more than just gaining competitive advantage; it is now essential to survival. During the past decade, globalization of product development has been a proven source of significant cost savings and productivity increases. To stay competitive against these companies who are increasing profit margins while lowering their prices, others in the industry must follow suit.

The momentum toward global outsourcing is growing fast. A 2008 PTC survey of executives at worldwide manufacturing companies shows that more companies are reconfiguring their products and processes, balancing the costs of high- and low-skilled development activities, and spreading them around the world. Design collaboration, in particular, has been an effective approach for industrial manufacturers seeking to gain market share, profitability and time-to-market benefits. According to another recent study – the Aberdeen Group’s Global Product Design Benchmark Report – adoption of global product design is steadily increasing with many companies now designing products in more than four or five countries. The reason, design collaboration enables organizations to increase product research and development capacity while lowering total costs and freeing up valuable resources to focus on innovation.

Despite the promise of collaborative design partnerships, many industrial manufacturers still struggle to alter processes and to structure products so they are best suited to these new relationships. As a result, many manufacturers fail to realize their anticipated ROI. In fact, Gartner Group studies show that about 50% of business deals involving outsourcing ultimately end in failure. The companies that practice global collaboration today are usually doing it on a tactical, ad-hoc basis.

Without a holistic strategy, companies struggle with fundamental issues such as:

• How to engage and collaborate with partners;
• What products or product module designs should be outsourced;
• What tools and methodologies should be used; and
• How can a balance of cost, risk and value-added for work performed in-house versus work outsourced can be achieved.

In addition, data management and sharing also pose complex challenges, including intellectual property (IP) protection, access/version control, change management, and obtaining visibility to project status.

Global Partnerships
Global teams, working collaboratively, can take on many different forms from distributed teams where internal departments are spread across regional or international geographical boundaries, to outsourced teams where a third-party partner is engaged for a specific product development activity.

While some issues, such as the sharing of IP, may be alleviated when teams are internal, effective collaboration is still crucial to the success of the product development process as a whole. Often, an internal department or division may share the same corporate branding, but its processes, tools and priorities may be as different as those of third-party suppliers. Supporting effective collaboration is crucial in allowing teams of all types to align along shared goals.

Challenges in globally-dispersed product development include:

• How to establish an effective supply chain strategy that aligns with corporate objectives, business opportunities;
• How to deploy a collaborative environment that aligns with the differing processes of each customer;
• How to deploy a collaborative environment that enables product development activities across distance and teams;
• How to effectively exchange product information with customers and suppliers;
• How to effectively collaborate across the supply chain, while efficiently managing changes;
• How to work effectively with multiple CAD data formats and design tools demanded by customers; and
• How to track and protect the IP provided to suppliers.

The Why Before the How
Even with all of these challenges, the success of the outsourcing practice can be dramatically improved by following some proven strategies and guidelines.

As with all product development technology projects, it is important to understand exactly why global collaboration improvements should be made before determining how they will be made.

Here is what an organization may gain from optimizing design collaboration:

• Reduced time-to-market and process cycle time,
• Managed design activities occurring in multiple time zones and work shifts,
• Improved development agility, innovation and flexibility,
• Ability to react to demand spikes on a global scale,
• Reduced product development costs,
• Improved product profit margins, and
• Ability to keep pricing competitive.

PTC suggests using a Value Identifiction and Planning approach to plan and organize the project with the following high-level steps:

• Align priorities,
• Define clear measures,
• Select focus area,
• Identify improvements, and
• Establish a value-based roadmap.

Process, Not Just Product
When implementing changes to support better collaboration, both the processes and the supporting technology must be considered in tandem. It is critical that the product development process is understood and improved in order to understand the relationships between processes, departments and tasks. Only with these relationships understood can organizations:

• Formalize repeatable processes around best practices at all levels,
• Improve people’s capabilities to execute the processes in day-to-day work,
• Deploy software and service capabilities designed to support process, and
• Plan the changes to coincide with product development programs.

Engaging Partners
While it is clear how companies can affect their own internal product development processes, optimizing partners’ processes is not quite as easy. When proposing process changes, remember that the collaboration and control challenges faced by internal teams will differ from the challenges between manufacturers and their partners – although they may seem similar. Differences tend to cut across people, process, technology and planning elements. Engage partners early to align expectations; involve partners in process and working practice development discussions.

Align Maturity Levels
To better understand the collaboration gap between the current as-is state and the ideal to-be state with the partner, it helps to think in terms of maturity levels.
Typical maturity levels include:

• Level 1: Ad hoc/undefined
• Level 2: Structured
• Level 3: Managed
• Level 4: Advanced

It is critically important to understand the relative maturity level of all constituents who will be engaged in the collaborative design process. Once the as-is states are defined, an action plan can be developed to advance all parties in unison to achieve a common goal or objective.

Consistent Approach
In addition to improving and standardizing working practices with partners, it is also essential to define and document these practices so they can be communicated and repeated. Use of a consistent collaboration framework approach to define working practices across process areas and organizational boundaries is necessary. The steps for creating a collaboration framework:
Define and document standard working practices,
Identify project collaboration vehicles,
Map collaboration vehicles to events and deliverables, and
Establish supporting infrastructure.

Consider Architecture
Product architecture is an important consideration when deciding to outsource design components to a third-party supplier. In addition, when improving collaborative processes, architecture should be re-evaluated and optimized if necessary. A well thought out system architecture results in better product performance, enables increased design commonality, improves design reuse, and improves field serviceability. Additionally, a modular product architecture supports management of the integration of electrical hardware and software into mechanical systems, helps automate and streamline the detailed design process, supports distributed and outsourced development, and provides well-aligned control points for managing the significance of product changes.

Plan for Change
A key element to improving collaborative relationships with design partners is planning for change. Ongoing change is essential to product improvement because product design change is inevitable. The key to success is a simple, repeatable change and configuration management process, so formal and informal changes that are proposed can be controlled, analyzed, planned, implemented and released.

Global design collaboration involves a complex set of product development process improvement opportunities. Companies are most successful in attaining the value they expect from global collaboration improvement initiatives when they follow best practices and supporting methodologies.

Parametric Technology Corp. (PTC)
Needham, MA
ptc.com