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."
Key to this is the company's patented "Dynamic Modeling," which enables engineers to make needed design modifications much later in the product development cycle than otherwise possible with traditional history-based modeling techniques -- where usually the original design creator is the only one who can approve design changes, Black says.
History trees are critical to military defense contractors, for example, where thousands of designers could be working on aircraft design over a few years. "Not having [a history tree] would be a disadvantage," notes Michael Burkett, a PLM analyst with AMR Research Inc. (Boston).
But in markets with short product lifecycles, streamlined design and on-time delivery are the bottom-line difference makers, Burkett asserts. He points to Panasonic Corp. as an example. The company was working to complete development of an addition to its copier line when it realized just months before launch that the product needed to be dramatically changed to meet revised market and production requirements. Panasonic's use of dynamic modeling enabled product engineers, working collaboratively, to do this. "If the company was using a history-based model, it would have had to start from scratch," Burkett explains.
Followers of lean manufacturing techniques, analysts say, are struggling to scale waste-reduction efforts not only within specific manufacturing cells, but across plants and in meaningful ways with third-party partners. "It's hard to without technology," Burkett says, alluding to the role OneSpace 2006 can play in enabling in-house engineers to work more interactively with their colleagues across the manufacturing enterprise and with external product designers and key supply network partners.
Enabling all participants in the chain to work with familiar tools is critical, Burkett says. "If this means employees need to log into a new system, this is a barrier," he says. "Each new interface adds more complexity that is hard to surmount."
While CoCreate isn't the only PLM vendor taking aim at this (nearly all CAD vendors are moving quickly to open their proprietary data formats, while Autodesk and Adobe are pushing their respective DWF and PDF formats as a means of democratizing design data access), the company gets high marks from Burkett for its approach. "They are... recognized for their collaboration component," he says. "Enabling the sharing of designs and removing the time it takes to do it is important. Removing the need to be physically next to [the design] helps companies become more responsive."
This article originally appeared in the March 2006 issue of Managing Automation magazine.