Collaboration Tools To Accelerate Design
Tue, 09/03/2013 - 2:16pm
Nathalie Regniers, Director, Industry & Product Marketing, Infor SCM & PLM
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Increasing demand for product specialization from customers, and market pressures to speed new product introductions, are two big challenges facing manufacturers today. Manufacturers with engineer-to-order and made-to-order products need new tools to be able to successfully share the collective brainpower of manufacturing and engineering in real-time. Collaboration tools help you share CAD designs, analyze costs, monitor reliability of components and discuss complex specifications with a global supply chain of vendors and subcontractors.
Driving Influences
Today’s consumer expects choices and engineering departments face heightened pressure to adapt designs to customer requests. Engineers also face pressure to speed product releases as manufacturers turn to innovation as one of the key ways to create a competitive edge. With the ability and business requirement to introduce more products in a year, design speed is even more important. Decisions are being made quickly, and engineers are operating in a fast-paced environment where convenient access to data is key. There is no time for delays caused by waiting for reports to be built, but data needs to be easily accessible and needs to be easily shared in real time across the internal and external organization. Self-service analytics and easy-to-use reporting are critical to meeting accelerated deadlines.
As global competition increases, offering a distinctive product is one of the few ways to stand out from the crowd. Product specialization—allowing the customer to request configurations, styles or as-completed specifications is key to maintain a competitive edge.
Benefits of Collaboration
Manufacturers need every tool available to boost productivity of the engineering department and help product designers manage their complex processes with greater ease. Not only must the engineering department speed the development cycle, they must do so with a watchful eye on cost efficiencies. It is of no use to develop a new product quickly if that product is going to be inefficient to produce with low margins and use difficult to obtain components. Visibility into costs, supply chain issues and overall production capabilities are essential. When access to this data is available, an engineer can work with the customer and suppliers and have confidence in the costs associated with the new concept. Collaboration tools help to bring the various influencing factors into context and bring stakeholders into relevant dialogue.
As manufacturers struggle with shortages of highly-skilled personnel, but still want to grow the business, the value of shared dialogue and effective collaboration is greater than ever. Personnel, including engineers, may need to share tasks, mentor recruits or expand their role in the company, assuming more responsibility for cost analysis, compliance monitoring and feasibility studies. In these cases, communication within the workforce increases in importance.
Selecting the Right Tools
Unfortunately, many consumer-oriented social platforms lack the depth and power suitable for today’s complex, fast-moving manufacturing environment. The qualities that lead to success in manufacturing revolve around rapid mastery of highly-sophisticated processes combining human judgment, precision engineering and financial accuracy—all united in a highly-synchronized framework focused on business goals. The most important functions include engineering and design collaboration, business-process integration, real-time financial reporting, analytics and fully-connected manufacturing execution capabilities. A competitive manufacturing company needs to be constantly optimized for peak performance under volatile business conditions in order to support long-term success.
There’s no substitute for having the right collaborative and product lifecycle management (PLM) tools to match manufacturing requirements. The issues and decision-points requiring collaboration contribute to the overall process and framework of the production cycle. The collaboration process needs to be integral to the overall workflow—not an after-thought.
Product development demands an unusually sophisticated level of collaboration, incorporating far greater complexity than shared social conversations. A PLM system supports the intricate and collaborative processes organizations need to successfully manage and plan an entire range of product lifecycle management tasks, including complex engineering information, CAD documents, product structures, change orders and more. As PLM systems function as an integral part of the manufacturing collaboration network, organizations can gain both foresight and insight about how they are able to manufacture current products more economically, create new products more rapidly and be sure that an entire product line is succeeding in the marketplace.
All manufacturers need a richer collaboration architecture incorporating deeper business functions. When evaluating systems, be sure to look for integration and collaboration technologies which will provide a path to the next level of teamwork, a level which combines human ingenuity, analysis and the power to execute strategy rapidly so the organization can succeed in a rapidly changing business environment.
Great insights on how to improve collaboration with companies for product development. These pros and cons can be used by Oil and Gas Drilling Corporation as well, in order to improve its business functions with the four well established organizations.
ReplyDeleteThis article is about challenges that the manufacturers are currently facing and how they are trying to satisfy customers. These days it is very difficult to fulfill customers and their demands. It is the duty of the manufacturers to satisfy customers because they are the back bone since the success of a company or a product lies in the hands of a customer.
ReplyDeleteHere the article illustrates how collaboration with various companies improves and helps developing any product. It is important to meet the demand of the customers and the manufactures responsibility is to satisfy the needs and improvise on the prior products.
ReplyDeleteThe article is very clearly stating three points for a success of a company: factors influencing, collaborating and selecting the right tools for a company. Let us look at an example. It is about a company which was not clear in these three important parameters. Nokia as we all know, once a leading manufacturer of mobile phones was forced to sell out everything except the branding because they were not improvising the platform but just added features to their phones. They also refused the offer from Google for collaboration and provide a free Mobile OS. It rivaled them later as Android. Also they didn't select the right tools to install in their products like NFS technology and a free-flow OS platform. This article also supports all the successive companies and gives us a clear idea of what all is required for a company to be successful.
ReplyDeleteCollaborative tools like CAD, Product cycles , simultaneous analysis of cost and quality and error detection in early stage etc are few tools discussed for generation of effective design and improving business functions so that customer needs can be met in the context of quality ,time and money.
ReplyDeleteThis article is all about how various companies improves its performance by facing new challenges to reach customer expectations. To know Increasing demand for product specialization from customers, and market pressures to speed new product introductions, are two big challenges facing manufacturers today. This article also says about collaboration this is a tool that will help companies to develop new products, few tools like CAD, Product cycles, simultaneous analysis of cost and quality and error detection in early stage etc are very much useful in improving business and reach the customer need.
ReplyDelete