Straight talk: The truth about collaboration in product development
Sidney Hill, Jr., executive editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 1/23/2008 2:06:00 PM
Nearly everyone involved in designing and building products regularly collaborates with colleagues, yet very few are satisfied with the results of those collaborative efforts. That’s one of many surprising facts uncovered in a survey on manufacturers’ information exchange and collaboration habits conducted by Harris Interactive.
The survey was commissioned by Adobe Systems, a leading supplier of technology that facilitates electronic collaboration.
“There was a lot of good news for us in this survey—particularly the fact that companies want to do more digital collaboration,” says Rak Bhalla, senior marketing manager within Adobe’s Business Productivity Unit.
Electronic collaboration—combined with formal processes for exchanging information—could go a long way toward addressing what survey respondents identified as the two major failings of their current collaboration programs:
• The amount of time it takes for colleagues to respond when sent information; and
• A lack of clarity in the feedback received from colleagues.
Harris Interactive conducted the Web-based survey last summer, gathering 407 responses from design and manufacturing professionals. For analysis purposes, the responses from the two groups were tabulated separately. In total, 197 design engineers participated in the survey while the other 210 respondents held production/project manager positions.
The survey revealed that collaboration on project information is pervasive, with 98 percent of both design and production professionals regularly engaging in some type of collaboration. The overwhelming majority (90 percent) regularly collaborate with colleagues in the same company. Only one-third of respondents said they collaborate with customers or other supply chain partners.
“We thought the number of people doing external collaboration would be higher,” Bhalla says. “This data indicates that companies are still focused on fixing and improving internal processes, though it doesn’t necessarily mean they are collaborating only with people in the same department. They could be collaborating within globally dispersed teams.”
Regardless of whom they are collaborating with, only a small percentage (21 percent) of all respondents said they are satisfied with their collaborative efforts. Seventy percent cited the slow response time from co-collaborators as their primary point of frustration while 47 percent cited lack of clear feedback as their major concern.
A lack of standard tools, such as software, also was cited as a major impediment to successful collaboration by 45 percent of the design engineers, and 35 percent of the production professionals.
Design engineers also are more likely to have structured processes for exchanging information, such as a central repository for team members to access documents. Production professionals tend to rely more on ad hoc processes in which documents are stored on individual team member’s desktops, making them more difficult for colleagues to find.
The engineers’ tendency toward structured processes likely stems from their greater use of CAD systems, which provide a central repository for storing design files. Still, engineers find it difficult to share CAD data with colleagues outside of their immediate work groups.
“There is a high level of frustration among CAD users about being restricted in what they can share due to the size of CAD files,” Bhalla says. “They can’t always send 10 megabyte to 20 megabyte files across their networks.”
When packaging information to send to colleagues, both design and production professionals are heavy users of Microsoft Office and PDF files, with 84 percent of all respondents saying they rely heavily on Office and 83 percent saying they make heavy use of PDF files.
Ninety-five percent of respondents also said email is their primary method or sending and receiving project information. Other methods of communication cited were:
• Face-to-face meeting (88 percent of all respondents);
• Teleconferences (83 percent of all respondents); and
• Web conferencing (29 percent of all respondents).
There also is a fair amount of concern about protecting sensitive company information as it travels across what are relatively insecure email networks. This was a particular worry among design engineers, who are involved in the creation of intellectual property.
When asked how they would like to be able to control information, 51 percent of respondents said they would like to place restrictions on the ability to mark up documents. Forty-one percent said they want to prevent people receiving documents from saving them on their local networks or desktops, and 39 percent said they wanted to control who has the ability to view documents.
Despite the many obvious hurdles to effective collaboration, the majority of respondents said collaboration offers numerous benefits. Design engineers cited the following benefits:
• Reduced design errors or flaws (71 percent);
• Increased product quality (69 percent); and
• Increased engineering productivity (63 percent).
Production professionals said collaboration pays off in the following ways:
• Improved manufacturing and production efficiency (79 percent);
• Reduced manufacturing production error or flaws (75 percent); and
• Increased product quality (74 percent).
“It’s clear that manufacturers see the benefits of collaboration,” says Adobe’s Bhalla. “But it’s also clear that the status quo—in terms of how companies are collaborating—is not as effective as they want it to be. They are frustrated by long response times, not knowing if someone has even opened a document after it’s sent, or not being sure that everyone has the latest version of a document. Globally dispersed teams especially need better ways of collaborating.”
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OK article, but the specialized world of engineering and information interchange is something...
Mark Moore - 2008-23-1 22:48:00
