Sharing Designs to Speed Time to Market

by Debra Haverson

Computer-aided design revolutionized the development of technical plans, drawings and blueprints long ago, yet there's often a gap in the life cycle of this electronic content. Whenever collaboration is required, be it with codesigners, contractors, suppliers or customers, technical content still seems to find its way to paper - and in and out of the hands of messengers and express mail carriers.

Whether it involves building construction or product manufacturing, technical design work is typically an iterative process involving several participants in multiple locations carrying out many stages of review and approval. Because time is always money, there is also pressure to speed time to market or, in the case of a construction project, time to completion.

Weighed against the need for tight control and development speed is the very nature of technical content. Large-scale CAD drawings and other technical files are seldom easy to distribute through ordinary channels like email. Applications are often proprietary and expensive, presenting more and more compatibility problems as the universe of collaborators expands.

To meet these challenges, technology providers are closing the digital gap, stamping out the last vestiges of paper-based collaboration with publishing and collaboration tools designed expressly for rich technical content. By turning to open, sharable content standards and Web-based delivery methods, users can work with codesigners, contractors and suppliers half way around the state or half way around the world with significant savings in time, labor and shipping costs.

Reusing Content to Streamline Plant Design

Be it in Kansas or Kuala Lumpur, medical and industrial gas plants can have a lot in common, particularly if they're producing the same products. That's why BOC Gases, Murray Hill, NJ, decided four years ago that it would standardize the design and construction of new gas plants. Robust content management has proven invaluable in allowing the company to reuse and recombine designs, specifications, proposals and other digital information required with each new project. The result of this new approach is faster, more cost-effective plant construction, more competitive service for customers and, for BOC, increased revenues.

Because gases are often volatile and require special handling, it is more cost effective to build plants close to the customer. In many cases, facilities are built right on the user company's site to avoid the continual expense of transporting huge volumes of liquid gas products.

BOC has cut the cost of building plants in some 60 countries worldwide through easily assembled "fabrication packages." Each fabrication package is a collection of hundreds of pieces of content, including 2-D and 3-D CAD files, photographs, standard operating procedures, budget documents and marketing and sales presentations. Each plant requires four or five main packages, plus smaller contractor-specific packages.

To manage the complex process of assembling, routing and approving fabrication packages for each new plant, BOC implemented a content management system from Documentum, Pleasanton, CA. Although most of BOC's design and construction content existed electronically prior to the Documentum implementation, it resided in numerous locations on different platforms. Standardizing on an enterprisewide platform capable of managing all content has improved workflow, version control and reuse of content for new plants.

John Koerwer, BOC's manager of design automation, stresses the highly complex nature of the way the company manages plant design content. "When you build a plant, it's based on a pre-engineered product [gas]," he says. "If you manage products that are changed through the years and you are building plants that are based on those products, you have a big version management issue. You need to manage which version of the document was used to build which plant."

A given design document may be used in multiple files for each plant and for more than one plant. Using the virtual content manager feature built into Documentum 4i, content collection managers (those taking ownership for a project's content) can define relationships to other content from other authors and collections. If the owner updates the original document, it can be revised within all other collections, provided that this is what the link specifies. Collection managers always know what has been revised even if they choose not to use the latest change.

All this functionality, Koerwer says, is critical beyond the design stage for ISO 9001 certification and for keeping plants in operation for an average of 30 years. If a maintenance or safety issue occurs in one plant, having reliable and searchable information about design is crucial to preventing similar problems in other facilities.

BOC's Documentum implementation has been Web-based from the beginning, but last spring, the company upgraded to Documentum's 4i content management system. The software resides on new servers with an Oracle database running on Microsoft NT. This repository now holds more than 90,000 documents or approximately 30 gigabytes of content.

The content management system not only enables better collaboration between BOC locations globally through an intranet, it also employs custom-built extranet portals to give content management capability to BOC's parts suppliers, fabricators and engineering contractors. Project participants can access drawings before final approval, avoiding costly oversights. Watermarking and date stamping features ensure that draft documents are not mistaken for final versions. BOC can grant access rights to external partners with compatible software, but the system can also generate PDF versions of documents so participants who lack a specific design application can still participate in review processes.

Koerwer says the extranets extend access to external constituents. "For example, when our fabricator is welding things together, he'll have to prepare pipes that will attach to equipment that we're buying from someone else," he says. He adds that a threaded discussion tool linked to the documents also improves collaboration.

Koerwer says this project has not been a drain on in-house IT staff resources or budgets. During the past several years, new hardware costs were between $60,000 and $70,000, and the Documentum software was approximately $200,000. The capital outlay has yielded a terrific return on investment. BOC has reduced average project development labor by approximately 50 percent to 2,033 hours, down from 4,140 hours previously. Standardization and reduced content development time has cut overall plant costs by an average of 20 percent. According to Koerwer, this reduction often translates into millions of dollars saved on each plant, and because the plant is up and running much sooner, BOC brings revenue online sooner.

New Designs Win New Customers

Chic design isn't just for expensive clothes and upscale cars. These days even plumbing fixtures compete on style and brand image. Moen of North Olmstead, OH, wanted to raise its market share as well its consumer recognition and appeal, but to do so, the company recognized that it needed to bring more innovative new designs to the market faster. A collaborative development solution called ActiveProject has helped the company cut development time by 25 percent, and engineers can now work on three times more projects simultaneously to speed new introductions.

Developed by Framework Technologies, Burlington, MA, ActiveProject went live in 1999, and it was up and running within just one day, enabling collaboration globally between Moen's designers, industrial plant engineers, MRP users and external parts suppliers. Working through an extranet, team members can access and review CAD files and other types of content with standard Web browsers.

Todd Loschelder, Moen's director of product development, says, "It does not replace the need for face-to-face visits, but once the relationship is built, the online collaboration works very well."

Moen's entire supplier base collaborates through ActiveProject, yet each company can only see files specific to its jobs. Audit trails allow project managers to check which participants have opened files. A scheduling application developed in-house also contributes to efficiencies.

"The scheduling feature took weeks out of the cycle time and gave us the comfort of knowing that suppliers were responding to our request," Loschelder says. "Prior to the ActiveProject implementation, communicating about large CAD files was problematic. We frequently ran into network limitations when transmitting large files overseas."

Moen discovered that shipping CDs around the world didn't help matters much. "When you are dealing with suppliers all over the world, there are no standard data formats," Loschelder says. "And there's no such service as overnight when you are shipping to China and [parts of] Europe."

Now all Moen collaborators can view CAD files in their choice of format and mark them up online, either in real time or asynchronously. This latter method often works well for Moen by expanding the usable hours of engineering time around the clock as participants in one part of the world work while those elsewhere sleep.

Sharing content electronically has helped Moen's suppliers eliminate time-consuming steps like measuring foam models shipped from the designer, then creating the machine language to feed the dimensions into its manufacturing system. Suppliers now receive a "virtual" model.

"Not only can they pull the model off the site," Loschelder explains, "they can feed [the model] right into the machine that will make the part. The accuracy is much better. When I send the [virtual] model, I'm pretty much assured that I'm going to get what I sent."

Since ActiveProject's implementation in 1999, Moen has cut its design-to-tool time by six to 12 months to a current range of between 12 and 18 months. This has since helped boost sales by 17 percent, and Moen reports it is now tied for market share with competitor Delta Faucet, with each company claiming 30 percent of the $2.5 billion North American faucet market.

While many collaboration tools are offered solely through ASP services, Frameworks also licenses ActiveProject. The purchased software costs $300 per user for a 1,000-user system.

Collaborating to Stay Competitive

Acer Computer and its Wistron division in Taipei are no strangers to time-to-market issues. Staying competitive in the computer industry demands a steady stream of new products. The company met its goal to cut its product development time almost in half with the help of S2S, a hosted collaborative application provided by Tonbu, San Jose, CA.

The S2S platform provides document management functionality including defined user access, notification of due dates, product life cycle workflow and version control. It also offers real-time Web conferencing capabilities through embedded capabilities provided by WebEx Communications, San Jose, CA.

The S2S platform is a project-centric application specifically created for managing design content - either for product design or architectural, engineering and construction projects. The system is integrated with Microsoft Project, the popular team scheduling application upon which many companies rely.

Wistron implemented S2S in September 2000 with initial support for 12 users. The goal was to reduce product development time for new PCs from 11 to six months. Tonbu was a relatively new company at the time, and Wistron (then known as the Design, Manufacturing and Services Business Group of Acer Computers) became the vendor's first large test site. With consulting help from Tonbu, Wistron integrated S2S with legacy systems including SDRC Metaphase (used for product data management), PTC Pro/Intralink (used for mechanical product design management) and Lotus Notes (used for problem tracking). While Lotus Notes allows for collaboration within a company, integrating it with S2S provided more extensive collaboration options, particularly with external partners.

The computer manufacturer's design center resides in the Taipei headquarters, while manufacturing facilities are located elsewhere in Taiwan, South China, the Phillipines, Mexico and the Netherlands. Wistron produces many types of computing products for OEMs and needs to work collaboratively with these computer manufacturers as well as with suppliers.

The S2S system lets users communicate asynchronously, which is often most practical due to differences in time zones, but large groups can also work simultaneously in the same virtual workspace. In the latter approach, users can collaborate on design changes in a live meeting, viewing content via standard Web browsers. Either way, S2S provides a single platform upon which all users can access content, even if they lack the authoring application. After markups occur through the shared projects workspace, designers execute changes in the originating application.

The system's project-tracking tools provide ActionPlan and ActionTask lists that managers can check at the start of each business day. ActionPlan has the look and feel of Microsoft Project and allows managers to plan and assign all tasks and due dates to engineers. With ActionTask, users can check the status (by percentage of completion) of all assigned tasks or click to just view tasks for one project.

"With different colors highlighting the status of all tasks - red, delayed; gray, done; blue, not due yet - a project manager can easily tell the overall status of a project," says James Wen, the project director in Wistron's business improvement office. "For example, I can quickly see how many tasks or milestones are overdue."

With project planning, workflow and Web conferencing combined, Wistron cut development time for its laptop products to 6.2 months. "With real-time project status information and an information sharing mechanism, project managers and members save a lot of time in communicating about necessary issues," says Wen. "Having a central document room dedicated to each project also saves a lot of effort in searching for or asking for required documents from different sources. The design quality is greatly improved."

The S2S platform is generally offered as a hosted service on a subscription model. With this approach, Tonbu says it can have a company up and running within 10 days with no capital expenditures and few IT resources required. The use of the platform including repository is billed at $500 per seat per month. Acer and Winstron have quickly expanded to 1,400 seats enterprisewide, and to make the implementation more cost-effective, Acer has now licensed direct hosting and use of the platform companywide.

Sharing in a Familiar Interface

Adding new applications is all well and good, but with each new software package comes the issues of training and integration with existing legacy applications. For Heraeus Amersil, a Duluth, GA-based supplier of silica glass and fused quartz to the semiconductor industry, SAP was the corporate standard. Yet this enterprise resource planning software was ill equipped to manage more than 10,000 engineering drawings. The company implemented e-Context for SAP from Ixos, San Mateo, CA, to make this content available at its headquarters and at six manufacturing plants worldwide.

Before Ixos was installed in 1998, paper drawings were maintained in file cabinets, sometimes with different sites having different versions of a part drawing. Better version control and disaster recovery backup were among the immediate benefits of the Ixos digital repository. For example, when the company's Wilmington, NC, facility was flooded by Hurricane Floyd in 1999, the company immediately purchased laptop computers, loaded them with needed content from the Ixos system and flew them to the factory so employees could begin work as soon as the physical cleanup was done.

While the Web-accessible repository has eased collaboration, Stan Olyszyk, Heraeus Amersil's SAP Systems Analyst Configurator says, "The best thing I can say about Ixos is that you don't know it exists."

Olyszyk explains that e-Context allows the company to link drawings to existing SAP processes. Working within SAP, users can access the linked content. If the user lacks AutoCAD or another authoring application, the system will automatically launch an appropriate viewer.

Heraeus Amersil's design phase often begins with a salesperson gathering information from a customer and either sending a fax or accessing the SAP system through a modem. The specs go to the designer, who then assigns a material number, draws the design (in AutoCAD) and quotes the job in the SAP system. Within an hour, the salesperson can call up the quote with a link to the drawing. At any stage of manufacturing and at any plant, employees can view drawings and collaborate on improving designs as necessary. E-Context can also send a copy of a drawing as an email attachment to a customer for approval.

Heraeus Amersil's enterprisewide implementation of Ixos in May 1999 cost approximately $500,000 including hardware, software and consulting. Although the company has never quantified the cost savings, Olszyk says he is certain that it has drastically reduced cycle time and increased productivity.

Closing the Gaps in Collaboration

Clearly, many technology options exist for managing, sharing and collaborating on even the most large-scale, bandwidth-intensive design content. The best advice is to develop a strategy that fits existing design and business systems, the amount of in-house development and support resources, the duration of collaborative relationships anticipated, internal accounting and billing issues and the level of acceptance expected among would-be collaborators.

While application service provider offerings flourished in 2000, this market seems to have consolidated this year. Rate structures and supporting infrastructure for these hosted applications vary, so buyers cannot always compare apples to apples. Some have low basic fees but turn out to be more costly than other plans depending on the size or number of projects. Some offer additional features and functionality at a higher cost.

When large deployments and entrenched, multiparty collaborative processes are involved, outright purchases of technology may be more economical in the long run. Companies must always determine the value and added features and added seats, but remember that benefits are rarely confined to cost savings. Time savings and advances in quality of service are too often discounted or not recognized in evaluating the true return on investment to be found in collaborative technologies.

Debra Haverson (hercster@bcpl.net) is a freelance writer based in Baltimore.