How Microsoft collaboration tools nurture teamwork and innovation
Updated: March 16, 2006
High tech and electornics manufacturing companies live and die by the ability of its designers, engineers, and staff to bring new products to market quickly. Yet for many organizations, a team’s capacity to turn promising ideas into new revenue has diminished. Fragmented business processes, a geographically dispersed workforce, and a lack of standards across the supply chain all hinder the product development cycle.
"Product development has become increasingly complex," says Bill Gerould, worldwide manufacturing industry manager at Microsoft. "Manufacturers have globalized their businesses and now have whole communities of suppliers involved in their product design."
For their business to succeed in this fast-paced environment, manufacturers must provide a shared platform for information and ideas that fosters timely, innovative collaboration among suppliers, engineers, and product designers.
Collaborating with experts and suppliers can be challenging
Continuous product innovation is imperative in today's competitive global marketplace. Consumers have come to expect and demand the newest and the best in everything they purchase, from electronics to pharmaceuticals.
Innovation is not easy to maintain. Manufacturers striving for innovation must overcome many challenges, such as:
| • | Constantly evolving marketplace. In fact, a manufacturer's very survival may depend on its capability to constantly evolve—to anticipate and meet the changing needs of its customers. Bringing new products to market quickly is essential. "Any enterprise that fails to replace 10 percent of its revenue stream annually," predicts the Economist, "is likely to be out of business in five years." |
| • | Experts located worldwide. As products become more sophisticated in content, design, and production, innovation and improvement require increased specialization. The necessary team of experts, perhaps including chemists, engineers, industrial designers, even market researchers, may be spread across the globe. |
| • | Integration with external specialists. Product specialists may be employed not only by the manufacturing company, but by its suppliers, subcontractors, and partners. |
This global economy creates a unique set of challenges for manufacturers. "It's just harder to innovate when you have all these different parties involved, each one with their own system and approach to design," Gerould says.
To work together effectively, suppliers and partners must be able to share information in each other's systems, while also protecting their own intellectual property. In fact, data integration has become a critical factor in business success. A recent AMR Research survey reports that 39 percent of manufacturers cited "better utilization of data throughout the organization" as the single most important driver for IT investments.
Manufacturers have two options for integrating data:
| • | Require the use of a single system. One solution is to mandate that suppliers convert to the same system used by the manufacturer. This makes exchanging data easy, but it's often prohibitively expensive. |
| • | Agree on a common platform. A more workable solution is to agree on a set of common platforms that enable people using disparate products to interact and collaborate effectively. This enables all partners to build on their investments in specialized technology—inventory systems, computer-aided design, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems—by providing a standard method for communicating and collaborating across these systems. |
The problem with working in different products that use a common platform is that the underlying systems, as good as they are, do not themselves provide the collaboration layer that enables them to interact. "The enabling technologies have not been able to support the new trends in product development," says Gerould. "Application software vendors have provided all these other things that engineers need, but they haven't been able to supply the collaboration tool."
Facilitating collaboration and accelerating product innovation through technology
In fact, what manufacturers require is not just one tool. They need a comprehensive set of tightly integrated tools that enable their teams to sucessfully design, plan, track, and manage product innovation from start to finish.
Manufacturers can encourage innovation, improve operations, and reduce cost when their staff, partners, and suppliers have the following solutions at their disposal:
| • | Global collaboration tools. Design engineers, product managers, sales professionals, customer care representatives, and other team members can collaborate with experts using instant messaging, e-mail messages, Knowledge Base tools, discussion forums, and other interactive solutions. |
| • | Simplified analysis of sales and manufacturing metrics. With customer information, sales data, and manufacturing audit trails centralized on a single platform, business managers can easily integrate data and present it in reports and charts for business analysis. |
| • | Integration of supplier and manufacturer systems. By integrating data from both supplier and manufacturer inventory systems, part requirements are communicated in an automated and timely manner throughout the supply chain. New products with high customer demand have a shorter time to market, and manufacturers see results fast. |
"Collaboration 25 years ago was an engineer getting up from his desk and walking down the hall to another engineer's office to discuss an idea," says Gerould. But not anymore. "Today," says Gerould, "manufacturers have globally dispersed engineering organizations, either within their own company or in their supplier communities. And all those organizations have to somehow work together."
The right solution: Building on the Microsoft platform
Because Microsoft Windows-based products are widely used and supported throughout the manufacturing industry, and because they provide a familiar user experience, they have emerged as the foundation on which collaboration is being built. Gerould explains, "The capabilities we have now with Microsoft SharePoint, with Microsoft SQL Server, and with the standard Microsoft Office products—those things are becoming the underlying technologies that all the partners use to facilitate product innovation collaboration."
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server provides a virtual environment for team collaboration around the design process. Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 offers data integration from multiple sources. Microsoft Exchange Server helps ensure essential communication between staff and organizations. And Microsoft Office Project Server can manage schedules and resources across organizations to keep projects on track.
The result—accelerated new-product development based on accurate, consistent data and automated workflows throughout the organization. The Microsoft platform "enables manufacturers to reduce product development time and seamlessly collaborate on new product development initiatives," says Gerould.
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