the analyst says - Collaborative Design Becomes an Imperative

By Marc Halpern, Gartner Group Research Director - C-Commerce, Design & Manufacturing, Strategies and Applications

As the engineering talent pool has globally dispersed, Web-based collaboration has gone from competitive differentiator to business necessity, creating work force dislocations and producing new collaborative responsibilities within enterprises. Web-enabled collaboration for product development, manufacturing engineering, and process planning will become more than just a competitive differentiator as we move forward. Current demographic and economic trends make collaborative design a requirement for global manufacturing enterprises that expect to survive and be competitive during the next 10 years. Demographically, the gap between demand and supply of experienced engineering and design talent is widening in North America and Western Europe, as illustrated here. Most likely, this gap will widen for the next four years as a result of enrollments that have continuously dropped since the 1970s. The trend accelerated throughout the 1990s. Concurrently, the demand for engineering talent in North America and Europe increased. Consequently, the current engineering shortfall of 25 percent in North America may grow to 40 percent by 2005.

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As a consequence, the trend to outsource content creation and manufacturing becomes increasingly compelling. This poses a daunting communication challenge, since enterprises that subcontract engineering work often report that their geographically remote suppliers do not contextually understand their requirements. Consequently, they deliver poorly designed components that require rework at considerable unnecessary expense and time lost.

In plastics manufacturing, iterative and incomplete "low bandwidth" communications via telephone, fax, email, overnight mail, and on-site meetings increase the risk of "communication disconnects" that delay time to market, increase manufacturing costs, and compromise the quality of delivered parts. Major risks relate to decision-making about molds that is not synchronized with the most-comprehensive information about parts. For example, slight changes to part features or the plastic selected can have a big impact on the design and fabrication of a mold, such as gate and runner locations, draft angles, etc. The communication challenge becomes exacerbated as product creation becomes a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week effort across a global supply chain.

Internet-enabled design and data management applications offer the most viable approach for addressing this global challenge. Web-centric architectures provide the outreach and scalability necessary to enable the required communications bandwidth throughout an enterprise and across suppliers, partners, and customers on a global basis. Collaborative design applications are evolving rapidly in the ability to capture and convey design requirements contextually. Design shops who have adopted collaborative tools to coordinate with mold makers have reported that the timeliness of communication and the broad bandwidth of simultaneous visual and verbal interaction have reduced the time to design competition by 20-30%. They also report significant reduction in costs associated with mold design mistakes.

From an economic point of view, enterprises require greater innovation and localization of product content for continued growth in their markets. A collaborative product commerce (CPC) infrastructure allows enterprises to instantaneously communicate localized product requirements from around the world and rationalize them into product platforms. This allows for more proactive planning of part families and molds that support flexible manufacturing. Toward this end, the availability of a globally distributed design team is advantageous, since the CPC architecture enables them to collaborate on the definition of a standard platform that serves each of their markets. CPC support of globally accessible, federated component databases would also enable the product definition team to eliminate redundant components, reduce overhead procurement and manage production schedules.