Collaborative design: the big issue?

Competing on price isn’t an option. Faced with cheap labour in eastern Europe, India and China, every manufacturing boardroom has to think up, design and build products that outsmart this competition. So collaboration among manufacturers, their suppliers and customers is ever more urgent. How else can you put together the coalition of mechanical, electronic and software skills that lifts your products off the commodity treadmill? Sure enough, every manufacturer asked in a recent survey for the Conspectus consultancy magazine said it needed to collaborate with customers and suppliers. But fewer than one in five manufacturers is using IT for collaboration. Conspectus concludes that manufacturers’ progress towards their collaborative goal, “is being hampered by a lack of suitable systems.” You would hardly think so to look at the market. From the leaders – CoCreate, Dassault/IBM/Enovia, PTC, MatrixOne and UGS – downward, a wealth of IT providers say they have the tools that make this collaboration easy. But even some of the vendors acknowledge that the tools are limited. Dr Uri Klement, president of web-based PDM provider SmarTeam, says: “Many e-commerce solutions lack true collaborative capabilities for complex product development.” Says Geoff Turner, UK business development manager for PDM supplier MatrixOne: “Most companies have taken on board PDM as a means of getting their own house in order and are now looking to integrate the supply chain. And they find that the tools that they have bought aren’t capable of doing it as easily as they thought they might.” Infrastructure is one problem. Nick Ballard, manufacturing design specialist at consultancy cum analyst Cambashi, says: “There’s often no link into the design system in the subcontractor, and there’s no links from that even within their factory, let alone externally. The design department might have its own little network, but there’s very few links externally with any of the suppliers or contractors,” he says. “It’s all done with paper.” This isn’t because the government has made a mess of the provision of broadband (though it has). First, plug-and-play 10Mb/s wireless links (IEEE standard 802.11b) can be bought for a few hundred pounds. Second, companies have learned not to need much bandwidth. You don’t send the whole model, just the part of it you’re changing. Third, the collaborators who need to see the model, or part of it, can see it using visualisation tools. Can’t they? Technical problems? Ballard sees a snag: “There are all sorts of issues about whether these images of the model are accurate enough to do real design changes and measurements from. Many people have got over the issue of whether the ‘pipes’ [bandwidth] are wide enough by constraining the number of facets on the model and therefore the accuracy of the model transferred, so that you can send it over very narrow pipes. “But if you’re talking about using that model to measure from or to drive some tolerancing or whatever, then the model you’re using may not be accurate enough for you to actually do real engineering on it.” Manufacturers complain that PDM vendors can’t demonstrate anything more than basic functionality. Ballard agrees that installing collaborative PDM systems involves “a lot of basic customisation and tweaking to get either the right formats or the process in place, [though] it’s getting better.” Some technical problems should, by now, have been wiped out. Chris Whittaker is a director of design house The Alloy, which has worked with BT, Hewlett-Packard and Unigraphics. He cites the ancient problem of incompatible CAD systems as a major reason why companies still don’t exchange product data with outside companies as freely as they might. John Stark, a Geneva-based PDM consultant, agrees: “To a limited extent there are still problems with ‘CAD incompatibilities’, but there have never been so many ways to overcome these as there are today. If companies really want to overcome CAD incompatibilities they find a way.” What normally overcomes the obstacles and makes collaboration happen, PDM specialist Geoff Hall of Tachbrook Consulting believes, “is someone gets a contract that says ‘You will…’. That normally focusses the mind.” But Ballard believes, “There’s a gap in the ability to act. Even if their big suppliers said, ‘We’ve set up a portal or website for you to access the designs and we expect you to email or FTP things to us’, people at the bottom end aren’t really in a position – technically, culturally or mentally – to take advantage of that.” Ballard says most companies have not imposed enough discipline on the workflow they use, by which he means, “Getting people to accept that they’ll have to get authority for this or that, or there’ll be an audit route of where the thing’s gone.” But many of the problems – about which release of a drawing goes to whom and who did the last changes – could have been solved with relatively straightforward systems without going to the trouble of installing PDM in particular. Avoid workflow! Hall’s advice on automated workflow is direct: “Generally, avoid it!”, he warns. “Engineering is too dynamic. Workflow works very well in insurance companies, banks and among people who do repetitive processes. It works well in ERP, because manufacturing is about repetitive processes that you hone to keep getting the price down. “In design it’s totally different. You’re into interaction, innovation, interchange. Design is all about how you manage change.” Workflow systems can’t cope with constant changes between one job and the next.” His advice is to use ad hoc workflow which is set up one task at a time. Turner agrees: “If people are interacting with you as a company, to look at requests made of them and fill out forms, [the technology is] pretty straightforward. But if you’re looking to have some sort of electronic transaction between one company and the next I think some of the tools are missing.” Ballard says that, even if the tools were available and child’s play to install, this wouldn’t make much difference: “There’s a lack of understanding at the user end of exactly what effect it may have on the way they are supposed to work. It isn’t something you drop in and everything’s hunky dory – because everybody works in different ways.” Stark says users are finding collaboration difficult for a series of internal and external reasons. “The vendors talk in terms of visions – so what they say usually doesn’t correspond to what they have, but to what they think they will have in a year or two. They also tend to be developing systems that use the latest technology – in this case, web-orientated – whereas most users would prefer them to spend their time making the previous version work properly!” And he adds: “I don’t think the technology (or lack of it) is the main problem.” Tom Leeson of SmarTeam says companies realise they have to work smarter across the extended enterprise, but adds, “They’re still caught up in their own internal quagmire,” and have yet to tackle the external issues. Turner says some companies find it harder to bring their customers on board than others: “There are cultural issues. [And] security is a big issue.” Everyone you talk to mentions security, and it can be a legal matter. But Ballard says that in general designers have to accept that their designs will have to be made available to people outside their immediate company or group. Sometimes resistance is designers being precious. Sometimes they might design things in a way that, using particular assembly methods or fasteners, gives them a commercial advantage they don’t want to share. “If you send off your 3D model to a tender, there’s nothing to say that the person you’ve sent it to isn’t going to send it to their preferred supplier and say, ‘Hey look at this design!’.” Web or paper security? Hall agrees that protecting intellectual property rights “is a difficult one,” but doesn’t see how collaboration over the Internet makes this any more problematic than sharing drawings. Turner shares that view, adding: “You’ve got to be in a trusting relationship with your partners.” And Hall adds: “The trust issue is important, [but] unless the person who’s trying to push it through has got top level support, it’s a struggle, to put it mildly. Where it works it’s because the MD has said, ‘Yes we want to do it’. The tools are generally there. A lot of it is top level support for understanding the process and what they’ve got to go through.” Ballard’s view is that CEOs and CFOs never give the same support to PDM implementation, no matter how crucial it might be to competitive collaboration, that they readily give to implementing ERP: “You can bet that the CFO can tell you how much the design department costs. But he probably won’t have any idea about how much an individual design change costs. And therefore when someone goes in and says, ‘We can reduce the cost of each engineering change,’ he’s got no metrics.” Says Leeson, “Some of these people don’t seem able to put a value on the intellectual property that’s keeping them in business. The product goes out the door. Invariably manufacturing is probably closely linked to the financial director and, as it’s something that goes out the door, it’s something that makes money. At the front of the innovative process, all that people see is cost. They’re continually trying to keep cost down.” Turner accepts that, with the world economy on a knife-edge, UK companies are reluctant to invest in ePDM or any other technology. But he points out that this reaction is at odds with the way MatrixOne’s US, Scandinavian or far eastern customers react. Those who have invested will be “in a much stronger position” when the inevitable upturn comes than those who lag behind. Some industries are doing it. Turner says the auto industry is pushing ahead on collaboration. MatrixOne has announced a new relationship with the Ford, GM, Daimler-Chrysler Covisint web hub initiative, for example, building a ‘collaboration backbone’ for the auto industry. Turner also cites deals with JCI and car-cabin systems provider Breed Technologies as examples of companies that are investing now for the upturn. Perhaps you should?