Whether your organization manages design projects for internal or external third party customers, your team is constantly under pressure to deliver great new designs with fewer resources in less time. The outsourced design business process encompasses the myriad tasks, processes and decisions that must be executed to bring products to market while managing your customer’s expectations. Examples of tasks and processes encompassed in product desing are: design review, sourcing, DFM, DFA, DFT, BOM development, manufacturing process development, and many, many more.
Most consulting organizations attempt to manage the design business process using email and FTP sites. They have found that email lacks the process and version control necessary to track the commitments and revisions inherent in the design business processes. As a result, errors are communicated to clients and suppliers, and credibility and dollars are lost.
By its nature, design consulting requires reaching out to clients and suppliers beyond the corporate firewall. This is an ideal scenario for hosted solutions, because project teams can quickly be created online in a simple to use and secure environment that can be taken down at the end of a project.
Some of the business applications for Collaboration Suite solutions include:
Project/Program Management — Manage a complex matrix of documents, processes and tasks across a geographically and functionally dispersed product design team. Design process solutions orchestrate, track and make these processes more collaborative in order to maintain communications, reduce costs, increase quality, and deliver products to the customer on spec and on time.
Strategic Sourcing — Efficiently evaluate and select suppliers to provide custom components. Design process solutions streamline the communication and RFQ process so that all potential suppliers are better informed, turnaround is faster and quotes are more complete. It also enables designers to easily and quickly involve suppliers earlier in the design process when input can have the greatest impact.
Design Review — Simplify the process of conducting periodic meetings to appraise development activities and completion milestones. Design process solutions enable designers to hold more frequent, productive design reviews in less time than traditional methods — regardless of where the participants are located. Design process solutions also centrally record action items and meeting minutes, and provides process, task and status visibility to all members of the extended product team.
Client Management — Client management is all about managing expectations. With design business process solutions you can give your clients a window into your progress, and adjust timelines and accountability when your client makes changes. These can be reflected real time so that your client is up-to-date on program changes and documents.
Collaboration Suite Design Management
Collaboration Suite Solutions, which augment and extend existing CAD, PDM, ERP and other information systems, include:
Collaboration Suite Project Navigator™
Create on-line collaborative project spaces that serve as central hubs for orchestrating design processes. Hierarchical task management is provided, which encompasses participants, roles, permissions and data.
All Collaboration Suite collaborative functionality is available with the ability to link any Collaboration Suite process solution directly to tasks and relevant data. Status rollup and tracking with Gantt chart display is provided within, and across, projects and subprojects.
Collaboration Suite Quick Collaboration™
Quickly create on-line collaborations where members of the extended product team including suppliers, consultants and clients can access, understand, collaborate on and resolve issues. A secure central repository provides access to all types of data and allows participants to view, markup and interrogate even native product data (MCAD, ECAD) with only a Web browser. Discussion threads, decision polling, action item management and history tracking are provided in an extremely easy to use user interface.
Collaboration Suite Quick Conferencing™
This module adds real-time collaborative capabilities, and is ideal for conducting remote design reviews. Live application, desktop and document sharing is provided along with whiteboard and conference recording capabilities. Includes automated management functions such as scheduling, invitations, meeting summaries and action item capture.
Collaboration Suite Viewer
For managing clients that don’t have your CAD software, the Collaboration Suite viewer allows you to upload 3d CAD files in a compressed format for viewing, measurement and markup. The built-in viewer allows users to view 3d files without a CAD system. Markups can be stored in the project attachments section for future reference.
Collaboration Suite Document Management
Making sure your co-workers, suppliers and customers have the correct file version has never been easier. Built in document management capabilities allow you to track your version history, lock files and secure documents.
Collaboration Suite delivers significant business value to the design process:
- Greater visibility into design processes increases customer confidence and management tracking
- Greater accountability for tasks improves on-time delivery across all programs Faster and better decision-making shortens time-to-value.
- Eliminating missed or repeated process steps speeds development cycles.
- Easy reference to latest versions of documents eliminates errors in design, purchasing and manufacturing
- Earlier and more effective collaboration between design and the supply chain enables reduced and more accurately understood costs.
- Flexible process templates ensure that quality process protocols are documented automatically
- Better management of process steps and knowledge of issues improves product quality.
Collaboration Suite provides these benefits through its unique PIM technology:
A streamlined and simplified user interface supports broad adoption across widely divergent functional roles and technical expertise. Integration between project, process and product data enables rapid understanding of information and its context. The thin-client architecture efficiently handles large complex product data enabling effective collaboration across a globally distributed product team.
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