A strategic approach to product innovation
Portals and portfolio management put the cap on a dizzying array of product development tools
By Roberto Michel, contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2004 6:00:00 AM
Joe Onderko believes better information management is the way to cut through what he calls the "fuzzy front end" of product development. Onderko is VP of the Lawn & Garden Tractor Business Group at Cleveland-based MTD Products, which manages multiple brands and hundreds of active projects per year.
In 1999, MTD installed a Web-based system for assessing its product portfolio. Thereby, "what had been a project management tool grew into a broader project planning and analysis tool for looking at the business case surrounding new products," says Onderko. Today, he adds, "We have what amounts to a 'product portal' through which we access all higher-level project and product information."
By centralizing access to previously fragmented information and applying "what-if?" analyses and other tools, Onderko says the solution makes the fuzzy front end less fuzzy. "If you have the necessary information easily available to you, the less an art and the more a science it becomes," he says. "You end up with a repeatable process."
Within the world of product life-cycle management (PLM), product portfolio management is a niche that exists farther upstream from design creation (i.e., CAD) and product data management (PDM). Portfolio management proponents say information management at the product strategy level has been largely overlooked in favor of operational-level PLM applications.
"The big opportunity for improvement is at the strategy and strategy-execution levels," says Michael E. McGrath, chairman of portfolio management vendor IDe.
McGrath, one of the founders of Boston-based consulting firm PRTM—as well the originator of PACE, a widely used methodology for accelerated product development—isn't alone in saying more attention should be paid to systematizing product development. Bruce Hudson, a program director with Stamford, Conn.-based analyst firm Meta Group, concurs that portfolio management potentially brings major gains.
"The key is to stop making losing products in the first place, and to reapply your resources around the efforts with the best chances for success," says Hudson.
At an operational level, collaborative visualization and project management tools allow for quicker, fuller collaboration; while at a strategic level, portfolio management concentrates development resources on the best mix of projects.
Assessing portfolios
Onderko says that when deployment of IDe's IDweb suite began four years ago, it was mainly for high-level project management, but now includes portfolio analysis and resource management.
IDweb generates two key analyses, says Onderko. One is a "project charter" that looks at factors such as buyer demographics. The other is a "feasibility spreadsheet" that aggregates financial costs and potential returns of a new product.
With about 300 active projects annually and nine brands—including Cub Cadet, Troy-Built, and Yard Machines—Onderko says the portal provides a Web-based overview of project status and development resources, and allows managers to play "what-ifs" with project schedules.
The portal maps to data in other systems, says Onderko. For instance, financial data is drawn from MTD's financial system; detailed project management data is drawn from Microsoft Project; and product record data is drawn from a PDM system from UGS. Additionally, MTD uses software from Cognos for business intelligence.
"[Our] underlying philosophy is that data entry should be made one time, in one place, by one individual, and then accessible to everyone through the portal," says Onderko. "If you ask senior management to start searching through directories to find documents, they just aren't going to do that."
Onderko says MTD accomplished several goals via IDweb and the portal, including visibility of projects in the pipeline, simplification of portfolio reviews, better budgeting, and a means of quickly correcting project delays.
IDe's McGrath says software for product strategy and portfolio management is but one of three main areas within a "development chain management" system. The other two are resource management—overseeing who is assigned to projects—and project management.
Combined tools can help companies move their research & development (R&D) focus from compressing time on individual projects to maximizing the output of the entire R&D organization, says McGrath.
Meta Group's Hudson, however, says portfolio management is an immature software space that can be difficult to assess, since vendors vary in approach. Vendors include all the major PLM vendors; smaller specialists including IDe, Realization Technologies, and Sopheon; and major enterprise suite vendors such as SAP. "Some vendors will focus more on the project management, others on idea management," Hudson explains. "Then there is the whole issue of integration. If you can't tap into the right financial or human resources data, then the solution falls short."
Core collaboration
Within each new product development project, Web-based collaboration can help speed time-to-market, says Grant Rochelle, marketing director with CoCreate Software, which offers design and project collaboration solutions. "It comes down to a matter of having more time to consider alternatives and iron out wrinkles," says Rochelle. "In between formal reviews, there can be a huge amount of ad-hoc but well-documented decision-making."
Intermec Technologies, an Everett, Wash.-based manufacturer of wireless and wired data collection devices, uses CoCreate's OneSpace.net solution for both internal and external collaboration. Internally, says Brad McDermott, a mechanical engineer with Intermec, the solution helps Intermec teams using disparate CAD tools to collaborate online and visualize designs. Externally, OneSpace.net is used for online sessions with tooling vendors and suppliers.
"We do a lot of radio integration with our products," says McDermott. "Now, when working with an antenna designer, we can pull up OneSpace.net and show him the exact space that an antenna needs to fit into, and the process goes much quicker."
McDermott adds that using OneSpace.net makes getting users securely signed up for collaboration a relatively painless process requiring only a name, an e-mail address, and a couple of minutes of work. "The real bang for the buck is the nearly instant collaboration," he says.
Use of the software has eliminated some travel, and is more effective than previous feedback mechanisms such as exchanging screen captures or e-mails.
More than a view
Embedded viewing tools are fairly commonplace in the PLM market, says Stu Johnson, a product manager with PLM vendor UGS, but not all vendors have a full suite of visualization applications. UGS, he says, does. "They aren't just for poking around the model," he says. "The tools can interact and work with the model to perform analysis."
UGS's visualization uses the JT format to view designs and other associated data, including what's known as Product & Manufacturing Information (PMI) data. "Being able to view PMI data is huge," contends Johnson, "because it's not readable in most visualization tools."
Jay Muelhofer, director of Windchill product marketing with PLM vendor PTC, says "integral collaboration and control" is built into its Windchill solutions by establishing linkages between its collaborative tools and its PDM software. With some solutions, he says, collaborative tools are disconnected from PDM's control capabilities, which can lead to revision-control problems.
With Windchill, users are able to check information in or out of the PDM environment into secure, self-administered Web collaboration spaces that are separate from the formal PDM system. "You can start collaborating and adding input to a project without clogging up the PDM system," says Muelhofer.
Portal technology will play a role in bringing together collaborative functions, product data, and other information that aids innovation, says Peter Marley, worldwide product marketing manager for IBM'sPLM organization. IBM partners with PLM vendor Dassault Systemes to offer PLM software, including a suite of visualization tools that support analysis and simulation. For portfolio management, IBM partners with IDe.
"The direction of the future is to use a portal environment to pull everything together," says Marley.
Marley agrees with Meta Group's Hudson that PLM requires applications with strategic, operational, and a tactical bent. As Marley sums things up, "To innovate, you need time to think. You don't want to be bogged down with the limitations of a tool, or in chasing information. The real driver behind innovation is having access to the information you need."
