Manufacturers know better than most how important it is to work well with partners. After all, they were among the first to implement electronic supply chains to collaborate with suppliers around the world. So it is only fitting to find manufacturers spearheading a new trend that extends collaboration into the heart of what most people in the industry have traditionally done in secret and on their own: product design.

Leveraging partners to help with product design increasingly makes sense in today's global economy. "There is tremendous pressure to get a new product to market quickly," says Mike Romeri, lead director for business technology innovation at PRTM, a management consulting firm based in Palo Alto, California, that focuses on operations. Those companies that can work with partners on design potentially enjoy faster time-to-market, more responsiveness to customer requirements, and an enhanced ability to change with market conditions.

Because it depends on a two-way flow of information, product design is a natural fit for electronic collaboration. Frequently changing design documents, content specifications, and sales and marketing forecasts dictate that people collaborate electronically from wherever they are. That is why equipping far-flung design teams with a platform for collaborating with enhanced security might be the only way to go (see the following chart).

Not surprisingly, setting up an effective design process with partners takes careful planning. For this reason, PRTM devised a "product development maturity model" to help companies track their product design processes. Collaboration figures prominently; it is one of the top capabilities in this model, which evolves through various stages of maturity (see the following chart).

The first stage is simple collaboration and communication within the workgroup, Romeri says. The second step is project excellence, characterized by rich cross-team interaction

The third stage of PRTM's maturity model is portfolio excellence, meaning that a manufacturer has a variety of potential products to choose from for its next new introduction. "Somehow, you have to have a means to evaluate which ones you really want to act on without discouraging the creation of these ideas," Romeri says. "This is the portfolio management process. 'I have these resources, here are the ideas. Now how do I value the ideas, and which ones do I act on?'"

The last stage concerns cross-enterprise product design. Here, manufacturing personnel communicate seamlessly with each other and with partners thanks to unified messaging, which provides one inbox for voice mail, e-mail, and other types of communication. Additional best practices include process monitoring and automatic alerts.

The range of technologies that companies can use to enable collaborative product design is great. Document management, Web portals, document rights management, e-workflow, and business intelligence all potentially play a role, according to Romeri. Workflow is particularly important; it can help knowledge workers prioritize their work tasks.

"Tools help people who are directly empowered to make decisions and participate in product design and development," says Sanjay Raveendranathan, director of global manufacturing industry marketing at Microsoft Corporation. "Currently, very few people have access to design/engineering tools like CAD/CAM," he notes. "We are able to increase the reach of those applications to additional people who need to make decisions related to product development. This empowers more people within an organization to make the right decisions to accelerate innovation and the overall product development cycle."

Even in an advanced vertical industry like manufacturing, most companies have yet to progress to the highest level of PRTM's product development maturity model. That is to be expected, Romeri says. The key is for manufacturers to start small: first optimizing their efforts to collaborate within a department like R&D, and then spreading the initiative outward, where the maximum benefit lies.

Going forward, it will be critical to get the supply chain involved in the earliest stages of product design and development. "You cannot afford to wait to get them involved," Romeri says. "You need to design the process that will build the product at the same time that you are designing the product."

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