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 NEWSAvoiding design snafus By Heather Harreld June 15, 2001 1:01 pm PT AS MUCH AS 80 percent of the cost of taking a product to market can accrue during the design phase. This has prompted enterprises to consider collaborative design software to eliminate snafus that can literally force them back to the drawing board.
"Internal people were developing products and didn't really know how their design changes were going to affect their supply chain," says Jill Jenkins of Current Analysis in Sterling, Va. "People were designing in a box. You have to be able to allow suppliers and manufacturers to collaborate within your applications." Linking people via a virtual workspace can decrease problems downstream in the product life cycle, agrees Jack Maynard, research director at Aberdeen Group in Boston. This is of great help in situations where one finds out that a supplier can't provide enough of a certain component, or that a product won't pass quality assurance inspections as designed. "There's a lot of information out there ... from the guy on the assembly floor putting the product together to the guy in the field who keeps fixing the same problem," Maynard says. "[Their input] needs to be brought in. ... The sooner [companies] can figure out when to scrap something, the cheaper it is." A changing business landscape that has manufacturers outsourcing much of their product design is driving many of them toward collaborative design software, which can virtually connect geographically dispersed designers, Maynard adds. "As we've outsourced things, there's less and less control," Maynard says. "What [companies] are trying to do is use technology ... to reduce that time and distance." Bom.com, in Mountain View, Calif., this month introduced a service that is designed to provide hardware-design and manufacturing organizations with a centralized workspace for storing, managing, accessing, and sharing all the data that defines their products. The tool, also called bom.com, uses a relational database to manage product BOMs (bills of materials) including part names, part numbers, manufacturers, vendors, prices, lead times, and other product-related data. Without this type of central repository, designers often employ an ad hoc process of communicating that results in duplicate copies of design data strewn across the supply chain, explains Michael Topolovac, founder and CEO of bom.com. "We start from the concept of the product and on up to the handoff to production," Topolovac says. "You can [attach] to the bills of materials every piece of data you need to capture what the product is." Another vendor targeting this market is Atrenta, which launched its company operations this month and announced a collaborative electronic design solution intended to accelerate the development of electronic products. Their solution, SpyGlass, is an analytical, forecasting engine that enables design engineers to foresee and collaborate on downstream engineering and manufacturing issues early in the product development cycle. "The design of electronic chips is a very complex process," says Ghula Nurie, Atrenta's senior vice president of marketing and business development. "There are multiple vendors involved ... [and] many times multiple internal groups." The SpyGlass engine is designed to build into the process the multiple chip-design constraints to which these participants must adhere, Nurie adds. In addition, the product aggregates the knowledge and experience of various experts and disperses it to team members. Despite the potential benefits of collaborative design, the technology can come with pitfalls. For example, security is one of the more daunting challenges coming out of increased collaboration between manufacturers and suppliers around the design process, Current Analysis' Jenkins says. Manufacturers are often opening up systems that contain proprietary data to their suppliers, she says. Most collaborative design products now offer roles-based security features, which allow some users "read only" access to product designs as others are allowed to make changes to the designs in the virtual workspace, Jenkins adds. E2open is an electronics marketplace that this month repositioned itself as a global collaboration network to help companies manage the product development life cycle. And security was one of the first issues E2open tackled before positioning its new collaboration solution, says Mark Holman, E2open president and CEO. E2open will be offering encryption, perimeter defense, single sign-on, roles-based authentication and authorization, and load balancing for reliability, Holman says. "People were e-mailing around design files or forecasts, which was not very secure," Holman explains. "They can [now] do their private collaboration on our network. ... It allows them to get security processes for their design team and their supply chain management team under a common umbrella of security."  SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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