ROI: Collaboration by Design
Needless, duplicate efforts and systems that can't share data are about to become obsolete for companies that design parts for the manufacturing process.
[From iSource Business, June/July 2002] There's more to the supply chain than meets the eye at least in industries that produce complex mechanical products. While some people may think the supply chain starts when parts are purchased to feed the manufacturing process, they miss the fact that those parts must first be designed. The many unique parts that will make up the first car, airplane or cell phone in a production run don't magically appear in inventory, ready for assembly. They are the result of a complex, often lengthy development process.
This is the engineering supply chain, and it increasingly entails the need for collaborative work among engineers operating as an extended design team. For example, two companies, a manufacturer and a supplier, often work together to create a part or an assembly that is designed to the specifications of the manufacturer. The computer software that is used during this process is called a computer-aided design (CAD) system, and it allows a three-dimensional part to be designed from a library of individual features included in the software. The CAD program, coupled with a companion analysis program, allows the designer to evaluate the properties of a part, including its mass, center of gravity and structural strength. However, designers admit that CAD software falls short when different suppliers use different individual proprietary data formats, resulting in incompatibility that adds time and cost to the development cycle. This longstanding issue has grown worse as automotive companies increasingly require suppliers to take on more design responsibilities, and as mergers in the automotive and aerospace industries bring together previously unassociated groups of engineers.
According to a 1999 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Imperfect interoperability imposes at least $1 billion per year on members of the U.S. automotive supply chain. This big-picture view of the engineering supply chain, coupled with the fact that product development constitutes at least 70 percent of the cost of bringing a new product to market, leaves little to prove about the need for improved business efficiency.
