"Speed is emerging as the ultimate competitive weapon," as BusinessWeek recently said.

Faster, better, cheaper: it was and always will be the way to compete. Revolutionary technology advances and processes mean leaders have to spot new trends, initiate new products and embrace new markets with lightning speed. To keep up with rapid industry changes, fierce competition and short windows of opportunity, companies must adapt quickly to the demands of the marketplace.

Speed to market is a key to success. In fact, one might say that the new world order is about global design, engineering, manufacturing, product planning, casting off non-core competencies — and unerring speed to market.

"Companies that have stumbled in introducing new products have suffered financially with decreased profitability, reduced revenues and increased costs," according to research conducted by Georgia Institute of Technology professor Vinod Singhal, as reported recently by Manufacturing & Technology News.

While there are several key steps that organizations can take to achieve quicker speed to market, efficient collaboration across the extended lifecycle of a product is growing more critical to the pace of innovation and business, particularly in the product design stage. Manufacturers face pressure to speed time to market, improve profitability and meet compliance requirements, thus requiring experts to share information with the extended team. To provide timely and efficient communication, manufacturers and engineers need to simplify the exchange of design information. They need the ability to engage — from initial design to development of technical specifications through procurement, production and delivery.

Simply put, they must collaborate with anyone anywhere, bring products to market faster and cheaper, and manage and control intellectual property (IP). This is essentially the distillation of collaborative working as a concept. Collaboration's emergence as a guide for speeding up the product development lifecycle, then, should hardly come as a surprise.

The conventional approach to supporting collaborative product development (CPD) is to buy a product lifecycle management (PLM) system, implement it, use it and…well, that's it. But CPD is more than "just slinging 3D models back and forth and viewing them," as Automotive Design & Production recently noted. The auto-design publication poses the question: What makes CPD functional, easy to use and collaborative? While often left to be addressed by the IT department, it would behoove design and engineering departments to evaluate, specify and implement the following infrastructural and operational CPD details.

Sharing Data
"Extended" team members use different application environments, data formats, proprietary viewers, expensive tools and incompatible applications that lead to conversion and interpretation errors — and slower time to market. Regardless of a company's size, part of its CPD process involves file sharing across diverse and distant locations: within an office building or a corporate campus, between an office and employees' homes, between product development partner organizations worldwide.

In these distributed operations, the trick is to provide the current copy of whatever files users need, provide instant access to those files, and capture changes to those files easily, securely and in real time.

In sharing feature-based CAD, there are at least two problems with having multiple CAD systems. 1) Converting native design data for disparate CAD systems is costly and time consuming. 2) Many CAD translations, such as those using the Standard for the Exchange of Product (STEP) model data, only exchange product geometry; other design data are lost.

In this case, some automotive companies, for instance, have turned to a Web-based product that exchanges data between major CAD systems and converts design data from the CAD systems into an intermediate format, which can then be reformatted and imported to other CAD systems.

Protecting IP
Organizations must maintain control and security over product designs at all times and wherever design teams are located to protect their intellectual capital — their true competitive advantage. Viewing and protecting native CAD, finite element analysis (FEA) and other files is, of course, incredibly important. Frankly, a password-encrypted ZIP file might not be enough to protect and manage a company's IP when that file is shared across the Internet.

For this reason, businesses should consider acquiring software packages for "technical rights management," including the ability to provide multiple levels of control regarding what IP can be exchanged, as well as to what degree. This way, an organization can keep full control over the information — even after the information is out of the organization's hands — and let it determine how and to what extent the information will be used.

Multidisciplinary CXX Visualization and Inefficient Design Cycles
Lacking the ability to tailor information very specifically to the needs of the user, and without version controls, endless cycles waste critical design resources and lower productivity.

Typically, conventional free visualization tools display 2D and 3D CAD output, such as drawings and solids models, quite well. For the other Cxx applications, such as computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) and computer-aided engineering (CAE), visualization tools are the domain of the respective software vendors, says Automotive Design & Production:

The fact is, sharing CAM and CAE data across application and management disciplines has not been tops in the collaborative lifecycle. As a result, a plethora of CAM and CAE authoring formats exist, along with the plethora of CAD formats, which brings effective communications to a crawl in multi-partner collaborative projects. And while .jpg and .avi files are suitably lightweight file formats for collaboration, they might not contain enough product data for all the collaborators to do their job.

It is a matter of overcoming the aforementioned remaining obstacles: expensive, incompatible design applications and limited design team input; at-risk product IP; and inefficient design cycles.

Moreover, it isn't only in the product design stage that there should be collaboration, nor is collaboration the only "key" in product development. During conceptualization, for instance, intelligence should be gathered from R&D teams and top clients as a standard operating procedure.

Yet, as TheManufacturer.com's Pamela Derringer recently wrote, "The rapid acceleration of global collaboration in design is proof positive that, like it or not, we can't put the genie back in the bottle."

For effective product development — from conceptualization through to commercial launch — there is no retreat for a designer/engineer to go solo at a single, U.S.-based location. Today's product development, as well as tomorrow's, demands not only collaboration within a small, nearby team, but also a global collaborative process…and doing so quickly. To the victor go the spoils inherent in being the first to market when delivering products or services in demand.

Our question: When is collaboration a bottleneck?

Resources

What Makes CPD Collaborative?
by Lawrence S. Gould
Automotive Design & Production, August 2006

Speed Demons
by Steve Hamm, with Ian Rowley
BusinessWeek, March 17, 2006

Product Delays Take A Big Bite Out Of The Bottom Line; Stock Price Declines Are Justified
by Richard McCormack
Manufacturing & Technology News, Sept. 22, 2006

Innovation and Speed to Market in Design-Driven Industries
Designer Today, Sept. 19, 2006