Design-system vendors have more to do to provide the systems and services manufacturing needs in the new century, say Nick Ballard and Bob Brown, senior and principal consultants with industrial analyst Cambashi.

In an overview of the collaborative design tools market for Cambashi's 12th annual seminar, Brown noted that, though CAD had a good record in promoting personal productivity, it had been less successful in releasing the collective productivity of design teams.

Manufacturing managers see design as a local matter for design professionals when many more, now without tools, could help make designs better. And today's collaborative teams extend beyond the enterprise. So, Brown says: "The challenge is the boundary between my organisation and the next."

Cambashi's research showed that collaborative design remains unattractive as an immediate prospect. Design-office culture - the cult of creativity - is one obstacle to collaboration. Designers communicate poorly and find it difficult to share ideas and techniques even in their own office, let alone with outsiders in the supply chain.

Managers and department heads can see a benefit for their organisations but little for themselves and they have a limited ability to act.

Suppliers have to explain their products more clearly to prospects. They use too many poorly-understood acronyms. They don't explain what the tools do and what business benefit they deliver to collaborators.

As a starting point, Brown suggests the spreading around of simple collaborative design tools which all the stakeholders in a design can get used to and learn from.

Ballard says Cambashi's research finds manufacturers at very different stages of readiness to accept the collaborative design message. The CAD tools they need at each stage are very different, particularly among the SMEs.

Ballard sees "little connection" between these concerns of SMEs and the sales and marketing pitches of the top four collaborative-design players. They rule the market by confusion. They all use different TLAs to describe similar product functionality. All claim a full set of applications yet implement different sub-sets while claiming number one positions in their favoured slots. And they all fight for the same Times top 500 target automotive, aerospace and electronics accounts while neglecting a key part of the market.

None, Ballard emphasises, has a strategy for the smaller accounts: "One size does not fit all," says Ballard, "and if joining up the design chain is to work it has to be implemented at the bottom as well, and that's their biggest challenge. They have yet to work out how to bring down their technology into the bottom of this design chain."

Vendors should also be aware, he says, that those just becoming new CAD users are frightened off by talk about the internet and collaboration: "It's become a dialogue of the deaf. People are selling to people who don't think they have a need." Yet, he adds, there are significant advantages to be gained in reducing timescales in getting products to market. That means getting to small companies and persuading them to play.

April 2002: UK CAx (CAD,CAM,CAE) market review now available

Also read what Cambashi had to say about PLM at the 2002 seminar

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