Collaborative Product Design provides a balanced approach for enhanced client satisfaction and profitability.

Few companies have broken down the barriers preventing internal collaboration among functional areas, so it isn't surprising that there has been little success in collaborating across multiple companies. In particular, collaboration around the design and development of new products has not delivered the benefits companies have expected. Adopters express their disappointment at not seeing the projected savings in cost and time and may even see the product development times and costs grow.

There are many reasons product design collaboration has not delivered the anticipated benefits. Information technology problems are the most frequently cited, but they are, in fact, the easiest to solve. The more complex issues around process, participants and performance remain unaddressed.

What's Gone Wrong?

In practice, collaborative product development becomes "combative" product development, as companies spar for position and work out operating policies that sub-optimize the larger process. Teaming agreements and a focus on program deliverables don't guarantee equitable and efficient operation. In the Aerospace and Defense industry, an agreement to collaborate is often required to win new business. A proposal team is created, technology is selected and agreement given. Unfortunately, such teaming agreements do not detail the mechanisms and measures necessary to collaborate in the most effective way.

In an extensive research project sponsored by the Council of Logistics Management, multiple issues were uncovered, but it was clear that many companies' investments in information technology had outstripped their ability to use the technology for the purpose it was designed. Business processes lagged information technology capabilities.

Some of the key reasons that collaborative efforts have not delivered the expected benefits include:

• Emphasis on technology; not process
• Roles and responsibilities of the participants are either not delivered or are worked out "on the fly"
• Substantial differences among supply chain partners' processes and systems
• Reluctance to share information between enterprise participants
• Mixed messages among major customers and partners
• Software vendors touting wholesale replacement over integration
• Internet mania
• Stratospheric prices of systems

Collaboration will eventually provide substantial benefit, but only if adopters fundamentally change their approach and expand their focus beyond that of technology.

Recommendations for Successful Design Collaboration

To be successful, CSC believes that collaboration requires a new approach. An approach focused equally on process, participants, performance and technology.

Today, companies link technologies to enable information sharing and consider collaboration "90 percent in-place." However, the business processes around these technologies have typically not been optimized or consolidated. The consolidation of processes and the collapsing of process time frames (e.g., moving buying decisions as close as possible to the beginning of the product design phase) have key benefits, such as:

• Cycle-time reductions
  
• Cost reductions
  
• More accurate scheduling
  
• Reduced engineering change through increased "up-front" supplier participation
  

Successful collaborators will adopt the principles detailed below to address the dimensions of collaborative product design and development.

Principles of Highly-Effective Collaboration

• Eliminate duplication in process, people and technology
  
• Designate one owner per process, based on "best fit"
  
• Integrate process teams to fuse the silos of product design, strategic sourcing, buying and program management
  
• Cultivate unnatural levels of cooperation
  
• Institute new operating model with detailed definition of process, roles, measures
  
• Encourage shared governance to drive radical changes in performance, cycle time reduction, total enterprise costs, etc.
  
• Maintain a balanced scorecard to reward new skills and roles for process owners
  
• Nurture organizational neutrality
  
• Promote changes to status quo, upstream and downstream
  
• Support coordinated technologies
  
• Instill a passion for state-of-the-art processes, practices, tools
  

The CSC "Bottom Line"

Companies that thoughtfully choose their partners and have a resolve to focus on one product at a time will accomplish successful collaboration. To accomplish this, companies must redefine their "rules of engagement" for product development - by ultimately transforming a competitive environment into a collaborative one.

For more information about Collaborative Product Design, please contact CSC's Michael Bauer by telephone at (248) 324-0187, or by e-mail at mbauer3@csc.com.

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