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by Alan Alper, MA Editorial Staff
Posted on Wednesday, March 01, 2006 12:00:00 PM Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox    | Abstract: | While lean devotees tend to gravitate toward big-bang initiatives that extract fat from the supply chain by adopting demand-driven inventory management and build-to-order manufacturing techniques, one area that is often neglected is product development. |
In its idealized form, lean manufacturing involves top-down-mandated continuous process improvements that eliminate waste from the entire enterprise. While lean devotees tend to gravitate toward big-bang initiatives that extract fat from the supply chain by adopting demand-driven inventory management and build-to-order manufacturing techniques, one area that is often neglected is product development. That shortcoming is something CoCreate Software Inc., a Fort Collins, CO, and Sindelfingen, Germany, provider of PLM applications and design collaboration tools, wants to remedy. The company is positioning its recently unveiled OneSpace 2006 PLM suite as a fat-free product development environment that enables dispersed designers inside and outside the company to use familiar CAD, ERP, and office productivity tools when interacting with design data. Those tools include everything from CoCreate's design tools and other PLM vendors' applications to SAP enterprise applications and, perhaps most importantly, Microsoft Office applications such as Excel. In CoCreate's view, manufacturers that have adopted PLM systems have created a layer of complexity that isolates design data from knowledge workers and key business partners. "Product development has hit a plateau," notes Todd Black, a CoCreate marketing manager. "Companies need tools to unlock [creativity] so they can be more adaptable and develop faster and less painfully with iterative design." [Click to continue] |
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