Over the last 25 years design tools have been developed that permit the design professional to achieve high levels of personal productivity. Today's mature CAD systems have gone some way to improve the productivity of design teams, especially when they work together in a single office or company. However, the extent to which these systems have improved the productivity of the design process for the 'extended enterprise' is very limited. Design Collaboration is a term we use at Cambashi to describe a broad category of products that help design professionals, design teams and stakeholders in the design process to work more effectively together, both within the organisation and throughout the extended enterprise. One of the key drivers of the current levels of interest in this topic is the high level of attention being given to business-to-business e-commerce. The moment you start talking about using external partners or resources, marketplaces or exchanges, to procure direct product, the issue of Collaborative Design is unavoidable. This article explores some of the business issues that need to be considered before companies move forward in this area.

The basic proposition of Design Collaboration is a compelling 'appeal to reason'. If all the individual designers, design teams and other stakeholders with a valid contribution to the design process can share their knowledge and understanding, then the ultimate design will be better and the design cycle can be shortened. This is a seductively simple message. Anyone who buys into the concept and wants to move the idea forward within their own organisation encounters the first big challenge - how to attach some value to the concept and develop a financial justification. There are two related problems. In the first place there is little or no measurement in this area. Most CEOs could tell you the design department budget but very few could tell you the true cost of design related work within their business. In the vast majority of businesses, any work or cost that may be attributable to design (or perhaps, more accurately, to poor design?) which goes on outside of the design department is not quantified, recorded, or allocated. This brings us to the second problem, knowing where to look for the numbers to build a case, or even how to begin.

There are two main approaches to justifying this kind of expenditure. The first is to look for cost savings against existing practice - a process improvement. A good example of this is the time and cost savings which result when design staff need to attend fewer formal engineering change meetings, and don't incur travel expenses to get to them. Inevitably this calls upon management to make assumptions that can, and probably will, be challenged. It also highlights the withdrawal or reduction of travel and networking opportunities that some in the design department may consider a valuable part of their job. Following this path leads you directly into the challenge of changing the culture. For large mature companies at the head of captive supply chains, process improvement is probably the dominant motivation, simply because the numbers are so big. Put simply, it is a drive for an improvement in efficiency. There is also a good ideological fit with a command and control approach to management.
The second main place to look for a financial case is to identify opportunities for increased revenue that might be realised by a more responsive and agile design process. As an example of this, consider a company making handheld devices. This is a very rapidly growing market in which good design is of critical importance to the user experience. It is also the case that the marketing imperative for such a company must be to grow their market share. These are often small companies (relatively speaking) whose best route to market growth is to outsource as much of the design as they can, alongside outsourcing the manufacture. It would be hard to overstate the potential benefits of collaborative design to such an organisation. This unfortunately doesn't mean that such benefits can be easily quantified!On the other hand these companies are much more likely to embrace new technologies and have little or no inertia to overcome internally. Here the dominant motivation is about being effective in the marketplace, efficiency is a second order consideration.

Whichever of these two approaches is adopted leads to a subordinate problem. The benefits of Design Collaboration may come in many different forms and across a number of departments. As a result, finding a champion to drive the Design Collaboration message inside the business is far from easy.

When we talk about Design Collaboration we are usually thinking of companies collaborating with their supply chain. This can mean large companies collaborating with smaller companies, typically, but this stereotypical image is unhelpful - the relative size of the players is less important than the significance of their contribution to the design and their willingness, or otherwise, to play. At Cambashi we think there is already a problem persuading the design department to share its knowledge and accept input from others, even in the case of a single company, working from only one site. This is despite the fact that in this case all the people involved share the common goal of maximising profit for their company with no obstacles to the free flow of information. As soon as the design process crosses the company boundary it involves people whose goal is to maximise the profit for their own company. Fundamental commercial considerations now colour every decision about sharing information and working together. In most supply chains the commercial relationships between the various partners are a balance of a complex set of conflicting requirements. The retention of design know-how is very typically at the heart of the issue.

Armed with this understanding provides an answer to the question "Where do I begin?" Whether you are a user looking to reduce costs or trying to increase effectiveness of the design process, or a vendor with a Design Collaboration tool to sell, the starting point is probably the same - start by trying to find out what design truly costs the business. Don't be surprised if the answers are rather frightening!

Bob Brown
Principal Consultant, Cambashi

A version of this article was first published in the July 2001 issue of Engineering Automation Report www.eareport.com

Other Cambashi articles that may be of interest:
Collaboration and the role of the benevolent dictator
Is industry doing enough to deliver on collaboration?

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