Design collaboration
Communicate better with your suppliers, your customers and yourself
The pressures on product design continually increase: customers are demanding more from your products while you are simultaneously trying to make them cheaper and easier — often through design outsourcing. A well-balanced product design strategy which seamlessly shares information among customers, suppliers and manufacturers can accelerate time to market and create a foundation for true long-term growth.
However, it's difficult to coordinate teams from different functional areas or organizations to harness their capabilities. Customers will not remain happy with the current generation of products for long, and technology developments and Mergers & Acquistions activity among organizations often muddy the waters. These challenges leave managers to deal with design complexities as they emerge, and focus on rework and last-minute additions rather than on the design chain. Product design begins to take a back seat to product maintenance. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Building bridges, not fighting fires
Although the ultimate value of product design is in the realization of successful products in the marketplace, making sure that all members of the design team are 'on the same page' can reap benefits far beyond the design process itself. A single source of accurate product design data can also serve as an invaluable aid to product engineering and provide orderable item views for future installation and service businesses. Our design collaboration experience shows us that consistently extracting short-term and long-term value from the design process requires robust and consistent design processes which harness the ideas and capabilities that came before, not those which create anew for each new design.
What about my outsourced design partners?
Follow-the-sun design allows you to reduce time-to-market by tapping resources around the world; however, this requires stronger product management processes and collaborative design tools engage customers, suppliers and manufacturing divisions. Cross-functional and cross-enterprise teams can introduce efficiencies into ad hoc design process efforts and can yield significant financial benefits for all design partners, including reduction in time to market, reduction in COGS and an increase in design and component reuse.
Our approach
Robust design process
At the heart of collaborative design environments are solid processes supported by configuration and product data management discipline.Cross functional & cross enterprise design
Timely inclusion of all functional areas into new designs is critical in order to effectively meet customer needs and provide high quality products. Integrating resources from multiple enterprises creates unique challenges to processes, information technology and design cultures.Design techniques
Modular design approach with a focus on design re-use shortens development time and costs while improving product quality improvement. Target costing/value engineering principles combine business and engineering disciplines to yield innovative, cost-effective designs.Design collaboration structures
Globalization and technology advances have enhanced two other structures: design outsourcing and global development.Collaborative design tools
Best-in-class environments integrate critical design data between stakeholders/systems with supporting management functionality.
In the end, we believe that the benefits of design collaboration speak for themselves.