The Hindu : Collaboration is the buzzword

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 02, 2002

Business

Business

Collaboration is the buzzword

The growing pervasiveness of the web is being exploited by canny manufacturing companies to shorten design time and extend the reach and life of finished products.

THE CHINESE greeting, "May you live in interesting times!" must seem particularly prescient to India's burgeoning manufacturing sector. Life in an increasingly `connected' business arena is doubtless interesting; but substitute the word `collaborative' for `interesting' in that benediction — and you have a manufacturing `mantra' that is being seen as the unavoidable driver for all future business models. Put a little more brutally, the message is: Collaborate or die.

Whether your product is a toaster or a two-wheeler, a watch or a weapon system, the key activities in the concept, design, development and manufacturing processes are increasingly dependent on partnerships. And business partners expect these days to participate or at least to have up-to-date access to the design process — so that the end product is something they can live with (and thrive on). The growing pervasiveness of the web, coupled with the availability of web-based tools for collaboration has triggered interest in Collaborative Product Development (CPD).

For companies which were already harnessing digital engineering design tools such as AutoDesk's AutoCad (the pioneer computer assisted drafting and design (CADD) software); Parametric's leading 3-D tool, Pro Engineer or the structural engineering tools from SDRC and Unigraphics (now reborn asEDS-PLM) — it has been a relatively painless, albeit priced, transition to share the design and development process with all stakeholders: Each of these basic tools has a strong and loyal following in the Indian engineering design community and each of them could be seamlessly e-nabled with CPD frameworks supplied by the respective sources. Thus designers, ancillary suppliers and key potential customers were enabled to access common databases and collaborate in the product development process. This made sound commercial sense, because as the industry has realised, over 70 per cent of the total customer value tends to get locked in at the end of the design process. The actual manufacturing cost may add at best another 20 per cent (EDS assessment).

But CPD has turned out to be the thin edge of a longer wedge — because the support of many products often adds significant cost to the manufacturer.

The name of the new game is Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). A term coined by the Boston (U.S.)-based analysts AMR Research, PLM denotes the sharing and control of product-related data as part of product development efforts and in support of supply chain operations. Internet and other networking technologies help to automate its collaborative aspects (source: manufacturing systems.com; October 2002).

Companies are enabled to simultaneously and interactively design the product, undertake its manufacture, trigger its sale and render its support. These hitherto separate, sometimes overlapping, functions are drawn into a single seamless web of information, where the access and the confidentiality can, nevertheless, be controlled by security layers.

In September 2002, AMR released are search report: "Product LifeCyle Management: What's real now", a sort of "end of term" assessment of the leading global players in this emerging niche. Interestingly the leaders all have a presence in India — and the manufacturing, strategic and construction industries are already early beneficiaries of PLM practices.

Like the blind men who sized up the elephant in every which way, these PLM providers bring their own unique take to the task — and their own solutions for the Indian market: Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) whose flagship 3-D design tool `Pro Engineer' has a large customer base here, e-nabled it for a post-Internet era at the turn of the century, with `Windchill', an application environment that facilitated product data management by a sharing of parts lists, design tools, 2-D drawings and 3-D models with designers, spare parts suppliers and ancillary suppliers. But it needed an extra something to become a full-fledged PLM solution — the ability to seamlessly switch between the local world and the web-driven collaborative playground. This, explains Richard Kulkarni, PTC's Australia-based Vice President for South Asia, is `Wildfire', a product that the company plans to launch in early 2003 — and which it sees as the biggest revamp ever of its engineering design suite. In effect Wildfire is will give existing users of Pro Engineer a web-based collaborative envelope, without having to invoke a separate tool like Windchill.

Last week, Autodesk unveiled two PLM tools — `Streamline' aimed at the manufacturing sector and `Buzzsaw' that is form fitted for the construction business. For existing users of Autodesk's solutions for manufacturing (`Inventor'), building (`Revit') and geographic information systems (`Map'), said Andre Pravaz, the company's Regional Director for South Asia-Pacific, the new products would unleash the potential of their design data "both upstream and downstream". He sees the evolution of PLM as part of the `democratisation' of digital data so that it can be harnessed to improve the entire business process.

The acquisition of well known structural design and 3-D software names, SDRC and Unigraphics by Electronic Data Systems (EDS) resulted in short order in these well known tools coming together to create a new PLM arm.

Already a leader in collaborative production solutions, EDS is now able to offer its legacy customers of SDRC and Unigraphics in India, the new muscle of `TeamCenter' — a PLM solution to streamline design and development with the larger framework of the product, that may lie outside the purely engineering function.

EDS is a recognised leader in scalability — the ability to provide a solution that can grow with the customer organisation's own growth curve. In a revealing insight, Ron Close, U.S.-based Vice President for EDS' business strategy in Asia-Pacific, explained to this correspondent, at the company's PLM User Conference in Bangalore in October, that if one took the long view, the world had already passed painlessly through another industrial revolution: the craft-based production of the 1880s, became a mass production world in 1913 and this in turn morphed into the Japanese-driven low-cost-high-quality era that lasted from 1955 to 1990. In the mid 1990s, the thrust was to be `lean, mean' production machines, and with the turn of the century, this had now become the extended lean enterprise: a manufacturing paradigm that recognised no geographical boundaries.

The three PLM initiatives in India, described above share one characteristic: each player has a strong engineering design solution that has a significant market presence in this country; each in essence is now saying to its customers: "Look no further to go `collaborative': I have the PLM tool for you right here".

"But what about the far reaches of the manufacturing business where engineering design may not be such a big deal? What about the makers of biscuits and bath soaps and mobile phones who need just as vitally to sustain a national or trans national product, without having to design items on a day to day basis? This need is the raison d'etre of companies like the U.S.-based MatrixOne which bring PLM muscle to a broad range of industries. MatrixOne entered the Indian market in August this year in alliance with the Dutch-based Scandent group. Here to attend Bangalore.com, Scandent's North American President Hans Ruigrok, explained that the global collaboration platform, `eMatrix' was built on a flexible, scalable and interoperable PLM platform, called Adaptive Application Architecture (AAA).

This is a canny reaction to an increasingly crowded market place where PLM solutions were popping up every day, running to different standards and for different programming environments. MatrixOne as a product-neutral player has a stake in creating a single framework for heterogenous PLM applications.

With 625 global customers, the Matrix collaborative rainbow is multihued even if the spectrum finally fuses into one message: We'll change the way the world brings products to the market place.

Companies like PTC whose customer base provides them a privileged view of the industrial world, may no longer limit the vision of PLM to their legacy customers.

In mid December PTC is scheduled to unveil a broad and ambitious conceptual framework called `Product First' aimed at industries which will benefit from putting the product at the epicentre of their corporate strategy, where designing, planning, making and selling functions can be clinically, exactly planned with suppliers and customers in mind. This seems to be PTC's push to become a PLM provider beyond the shadow its own engineering offerings.

AMR's recent report identifies other players in the PLM space: IBM/Dassault; SAP and Oracle who are already in India albeit in other niches. They can be expected to stake their own claims on the PLM turf. As Indian industry increasingly tests the waters of the global market, it may have already discovered the unspoken mantra: that product development is part art, part science.

The art part is a matter of luck and timing. But the science could do with an infusion of seamless outside support — which is what PLM is all about. It may be the vital edge that matters, for surviving the tough competitive market place in what is now increasingly being recognized as the `Age of Temporary Advantage'.

Anand Parthasarathy

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