28 March 2009

Duncan Jefferies reports on the technologies that help manufacturing companies capture ideas and develop them into winning products.

New product development (NPD) is a costly and time-consuming process. It is also, however, vital for maintaining competitive advantage and ensuring the future success of an organisation. To yield successful results, NPD must be approached in a structured and carefully managed way; otherwise, manufacturers risk wasting valuable time and resources on products that are not viable for market. And with increasing pressures from shorter product lifecycles, consumer demand for innovative features, and the desire for ‘made-to-order’ and ‘made-to-engineer’ options for products such as cars and computers, the need for efficient systems is greater than ever.

“Innovation management is the step zero of the new product development cycle,” says Günter Rester, worldwide director of PLM solutions at Microsoft. “Before you have a product or even a first design of one, you’ll have been through an innovation management process to come up with the idea itself.” According to Rester, although many people see this process as part of the PLM cycle, there is a big distinction between PLM and innovation management. “Although innovation management is defined by and related to products, that’s just one important aspect of it. It’s also related to processes, and even business models. So innovation management can mean all kinds of new ideas in all kinds of format, not just an idea about a new product or a product update.”

Microsoft offers innovation process management. “We give the customer a methodology and a tool that allows them to capture ideas, filter them, communicate, collaborate and come up with a final idea which can be developed into a new process, product, or business model. We keeps things open.”

So how can manufacturers identify market opportunities for new products? Klaus Kratzer, vice president of enterprise server products at Fujitsu Siemens Computers, says there are many ways of generating good ideas. “Cooperating with universities, having a strong network with potential partner companies, and close cooperation with consulting and market research companies are all examples of what we are doing to meet that challenge. For emerging ideas, workgroups independent from daily business are set up, which gives them a strong focus.”

Manufacturers must be able to quickly assess which new product concepts are worth investing in and manage the projects and intellectual property effectively. “When an idea comes in, every business case, project or product brief looks different,” says Paul Major, CEO of Program Framework. “That makes it difficult to aggregate and compare them, so we put workflows in place to capture every idea that comes into the organisation in the same manner.”

During the concept and development testing phase, proof of feasibility is explored through virtual computer aided rendering and rapid prototyping. Manufacturers can now design products in full 3D detail, simulate functions, analyse performance and anticipate interactions among the different components, reducing the time needed to bring products to market. Dassault Systèmes offers a comprehensive toolset for the ideas phase; its solutions enable users to create, share and experience products in full 3D. “Our portfolio is made of around 200 products, with specialist packs for the shape designer, for the system architect, and for the mechanical or structural architect,” says Philippe Laufer, vice president, Catia R&D. Catia Version 6, a PLM 2.0 solution, was launched in May 2008. It adopts the concepts of online communities and creation, harnessing collaborative intelligence from diverse sources to maximise intellectual assets.

With PLM 2.0 solutions, virtual products and systems behave as they would in the physical world, allowing all users to have immersive, lifelike experiences in 3D. Catia Version 6 lets designers exchange pieces of 3D design in real time and communicate via a chat window to resolve any issues. This allows users to virtually optimise products and identify and eliminate malfunctions or production errors prior to any physical build.

The ability to search for and quickly access information within an organisation is important, but to be really useful systems have to be intelligent enough to link information in a contextual way

Tim Matsell, Ascari NPD requires expertise in both engineering and marketing, with cross-functional teams drawn from across the organisation. Neoxen Visual Modus is a collaboration application for departments and distributed project teams. It supports working on a wide range of project activities, from document collaboration to custom solutions integrated with business processes and workflows, providing a single point of access to manage, restructure and share documents, process models, tools and resources. NaviLists, directly accessible through the Windows Desktop, gather each project’s content into one easy-to-use structure.

“The items on the NaviList can be Web sites, but they can also be links into documents or folders inside SharePoint, or links to another system like ProjectWise,” says Esa Tervo, CEO of Neoxen Systems. “What we have found with product development is that you have to somehow integrate or provide a single point of access to multiple systems. In the best-case scenario everybody uses one system, but in real life it’s not like that. You have to provide navigation to multiple systems.”

People need to collaborate on product designs, often globally, and evaluate product portfolios to ensure the right products are brought to market. “With infrastructure platforms like SharePoint, and embedded capabilities like online presence detection, Microsoft is advancing the case for using social tools to collaborate in commercial settings for economic gain,” says Jim Heppelman, president and chief operating officer of PTC. “The Microsoft-led support of industrialised, business-ready social technologies is termed ‘social computing’. When these capabilities are implemented seamlessly as part of a product development technology platform - as has been done by PTC - the result is ‘social product development’. Combining these social computing technologies into a tightly woven, easy-to-use platform gives the team unique and productive ways to share experiences, exchange information and manage the evolution of ideas into profitable products.”

“The ability to search for and quickly access information within an organisation is important, but to be really useful systems have to be intelligent enough to link information in a contextual way,” says Tim Matsell, director of solutions delivery at Ascari. “For example, if someone is doing an experiment to improve a product or process, and working at a particular process step, if another person in the organisation is searching for information on improving processes or is finding problems that may be attributed to that step, the system needs to draw their attention to the process improvement work already being undertaken. The challenge is for software systems to make intelligent decisions about linking information in a contextual way, not relying on people manually tagging information with keywords.”

A flexible set of enterprise applications and NPD processes is essential when developing innovative products that may differ significantly from the initial conception. “When a company starts out, having developed some new technology, the key driver is obviously to commercialise and improve it,” Matsell continues. “At that point, you don’t want restrictive systems in place. But unless there’s some sort of framework for building applications, you can end up with a lot of stand-alone applications which can’t be linked together effectively. SharePoint allows companies to be very creative and flexible about what functionality they develop, but still provides a framework which can expose that functionality to new systems and processes as the company grows.”

According to Heppleman: “The key is to have a scalable solution with the integrations to support a multitude of connections (for example, to manage engineering data regardless of source), but also to support the requisite levels of openness needed for connectivity to current legacy systems while retaining headroom to allow for future growth.” PTC’s Windchill PLM solution aims to address this need. It plugs into an existing corporate infrastructure with a multitude of pre-built integrations, yet it has a robust set of integration tools for achieving enterprise interoperability.

When it comes to integrating PLM software with engineering tools and enterprise applications, Geoff Haines, managing director at Desktop Engineering, recommends a staged approach: “It’s a case of not doing everything at once. If you make monumental changes in your IT structure, that’s when things can go wrong.”

“Manufacturers need to think holistically about their product development processes,” says Heppleman. “Adopting PLM tools is but one piece of a larger equation that also involves technology-independent activities such as reengineering existing processes, implementing proper training programmes, and driving user adoption.”

PLM software is essential for bringing projects in on schedule and providing predictable product development cycles. “With PLM, you need a sense of what your key decision gates are,” says Major. “If I’ve got 16 key gates from prototype conformation onwards, depending on the depth or complexity of the product I’m developing, I can drill down to different levels of detail within each of those phases. But if that becomes too complex the information doesn’t get used. We help build a standard project approach, so every time you do a new project, all the standard tasks are already set up.”

For Kratzer, product data management tools play a vital role in today’s development processes, allowing project managers to easily incorporate real data into their specifications. “We develop our products on a global basis,” he says. “Easy access to information and automatic transformation to other related IT systems is mandatory for a successful development.”

This article first appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Prime magazine.

Add a comment