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There's a lot of interest these days in the future of PLM from the management viewpoint, but it's equally important to look at the view from the product development team. The typical engineer would like to be able to collaborate effectively with other members of the development team, and these days that often means with someone who is located on a different site. And for project and program managers, who are tasked with organizing the distributed product development teams, the pressure to manage resources, commitments and schedules can be intense. The need for effective collaboration isn't just a whim of an individual engineer or project manager. It's being driven by powerful forces outside the engineering department and program office.
In our ever more global economy, the location of sales, design and manufacturing sites, customers and suppliers are more dispersed than ever before, so a common communication process is required to be competitive. Due to widespread outsourcing, manufacturers need to involve dispersed project teams from different companies in a single product development environment. And companies want to give project team members the ability to do their tasks more effectively by reducing their reliance on manual processes (email, ftp, etc) and increasing access to data (Excel, MS Project, PDM, legacy applications, etc).
As a result of these pressures, manufacturers are demanding 2 key requirements in their product development processes. First, the ability to manage programs for visibility and accountability. Secondly, process support and documentation for cross-functional team activities.
The solution is PLM, but traditional PLM solutions have been deployed behind an organization's firewall, restricting their power to relatively few participants. Although most PLM solutions provide some capabilities for web-based collaboration, their architecture inherently restricts their functionality outside the firewall to simple tasks, and places a burden on internal IT administrators to manage external access. While that may be OK in a large corporation with a big IT staff, it can be difficult to handle in small and mid-sized companies. For SMEs, and for small project teams in large companies, a more suitable solution may be a hosted web-based portal environment for managing all the tasks, drawings, resources and documents required throughout product lifecycle processes. This works particularly well for engineers collaborating on product development and New Product Introduction (NPI) projects with participants outside of the engineering organization, such as sales and marketing, quality assurance, customers and suppliers.
A typical application designed for the web might have an integrated suite of applications all in one place, including:
- Online project management to assign and track tasks and resources
- Web enabled lightweight 3D file viewing
- Document management for sharing files
- Streamlined RFQ processes to engage suppliers in early sourcing workflows
- Integrated email messaging and audit logs for audit compliance
implemented with:
- No need for IT support
- Very low training requirement
With a single source of project and process information available over the internet, product development teams have the needed visibility into the status of their processes and projects, the ability to quickly and easily update their project tasks and to share any related drawings and documents. This increases a company's ability to be more responsive to its customers, increases the efficiency of its product teams and enables more streamlined communication and control through its supply chain.
For example, ENGINEERING.com's Collaboration Suite is used in many different collaborative product development situations, including :
- A globally distributed electronics manufacturer shares project data across global design centers, evaluates NPI programs and includes customers and suppliers in the design process.
- An automotive supplier's design team works closely with its remote sales offices to manage their quotation processes. These processes include developing customized products, quickly responding to changes, and speeding winning quotations to their customers.
- An engineering firm involves their customer and suppliers on a massive project that requires constant updates and changes to a tight schedule.
