Coordinating product development across a global team is challenging. But the right mix of collaboration technologies and business processes can give manufacturers the agility and cost-savings they seek.

When you think of housewares such as sippie cups, coffee mugs and sports bottles, innovative product design doesn't exactly spring to mind. Yet try to craft a multi-million dollar business around selling such products to retail giants like Wal-Mart, and it becomes pretty clear you need a constantly updated portfolio of design winners that can be mass produced in a moment's notice. And, don't forget, you need to do it all as inexpensively as possible.

That was the situation In Zone Inc. (Austell, GA) faced. So several years ago, the company opted to shift all product development to China to take advantage of lower costs on everything from labor and tooling to getting faster turnaround time on delivering products to market. With that decision, however, came a flood of communications bottlenecks and cultural challenges. Specifically, a major problem for In Zone was getting engineering and marketing teams located on opposite ends of the globe, in different time zones and speaking a multitude of languages, to collaborate regularly and share critical product information.

For example, it often takes two or three e-mails to convey a point or problem to be solved and sometimes issues are still misunderstood. Despite a whopping monthly FedEx bill, information doesn't always get circulated to where it should be, when it should be. Additionally, because In Zone engineers in the United States lack the language and other skills to do joint design reviews with their peers overseas, they often get stuck waiting around while the company's Hong Kong-based team plays middleman and facilitates communication with the partnering Chinese factories.
"Right now, it's often a disconnect-it's not uncommon to lose a month or two trying to finalize designs with the factories," says Monty Allen, product design director for In Zone, an eight-year-old company. In Zone isn't, however, considering dropping its global design strategy. Instead, the company is evaluating a hosted collaboration tool from Engineering.com in order to solve some of its communications woes.

Regional flare
Just as In Zone remains committed to its global outsourcing model, the trend shows no signs of abating among manufacturers, whether mid-sized or global giants. According to a Deloitte Research survey of 600 manufacturers across North America and Europe, more than 80% are selling goods outside their home regions, and 48% already engineer products in lower-cost regions such as China, Mexico and Central and Eastern Europe.

By doing product development on a global scale, manufacturers like In Zone can tap into vastly cheaper labor pools and materials that enable them to be far more price competitive and prolific in their designs. The move also lets them tap into domain expertise on a local level, ensuring that they can sell a product that meets the functional and aesthetic requirements of a particular geographic region.

Of course, the probability of manufacturers cashing-in on these advantages hinges on their ability to take on communications and cultural challenges and get global teams working more efficiently together. Given the competitive nature of today's economic climate, manufacturers across all industries can not afford any lag time in getting product to market, nor can they inject any unnecessary cost into their processes resulting from ill-conceived designs.

That's why manufacturers like In Zone are experimenting with a variety of design collaboration technologies-from simple e-mail and FTP servers to state-of-the-art collaboration suites, virtual meeting applications and videoconferencing systems. Manufacturers having the most success with global product development are also formalizing workflows, creating flexible business processes and doing rigorous upfront scoping. This way, all parties involved, no matter where they reside and what languages they speak, know exactly what's expected of them and are in sync on everything from scheduling to deliverables.

"It's a whole lot better than it used to be," notes Ken Amann, director of research for CIMdata Inc. (Ann Arbor, MI). "The two things that have made the biggest difference here are collaboration and visualization tools, which bring more types of information together. Yet while we've made huge progress, there are still security, performance and IT-related challenges, as well as those that are process-oriented related to how people work differently."

One of the primary drivers leading manufacturers like In Zone to scatter development and manufacturing organizations around the globe is the desire to capitalize on local expertise and resources so the resulting product can be "localized" to meet a specific regions' needs. For manufacturers, this idea of localization is a balancing act between leveraging designs and reusing parts on a worldwide basis to keep costs in check, while also meeting the specific regulatory and design needs of a particular region.
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- Beth Stackpole, Managing Automation