No company works alone. Collaboration is now part of almost everything you do. You need expertise in determining the optimum mix of inside and outside design and development, understanding the relationship of the supply chain to the development process, and smoothly integrating the work of outside suppliers. PDC offers you guidance to do all these things effectively.
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Codevelopment and Partnering
As intellectual capital becomes more important than physical assets in a company’s competitive arsenal, an organizational trend toward cross-enterprise virtual teams has emerged. Rapid product development is more important than ever, but the means to achieve it has changed. PDC helps companies create cross-enterprise virtual teams that work.
While companies once relied on co-location, where all team members (often including outside suppliers) were physically close, as a way to speed development and ease communication, this is no longer an ideal model for many companies. Instead, virtual collaborators rely on technology to simulate the experience of physical proximity and create a co-wired environment. Creating such an environment requires careful nurturing and changes in how a company conducts business.
In a co-wired environment, partners and suppliers may be located in different regions and time zones, but the project can carry on via non-real-time threaded discussions and overlapped meetings. The freedom to shop the world for design expertise and manufacturing capacity provides flexible design capacity and allows you to concentrate on areas where your company adds greatest value. Outside designers may be willing to share the risks and rewards of the product, giving them great incentive for successful delivery.
The shift from co-located to co-wired environments requires a strategy for a collaboration layer and control layer of infrastructure, the formation and training of distributed, collaborative teams, and the ability to change the way you motivate and manage these teams. PDC helps you make this kind of collaboration a reality to significantly shorten time-to-market and time-to-volume manufacturing.
Cross-Functional Team Management
In a product development practices study conducted by PDC, more than 90 percent of the respondents reported that effective use of cross-functional teams plays a large part in reducing time-to-market.
The way a team is set up, and the individual roles, responsibilities, and metrics associated with it, can mean the difference between on-time delivery and missed opportunities. PDC has helped companies structure and empower teams to make decisions that move projects quickly across the finish line.
While most product development organizations have cross-functional teams in place, these teams can be inefficient. Too often there is no charter for the group, team activities are not tied to company goals, and teams operate as loosely coupled committees who come together only to share static information. Team members struggle with priorities as they serve on multiple teams while shouldering their own workloads. This forces them to focus on the problem of the day rather than on team activities that contribute to the future. Members often do not feel ownership of the team's overall goal, focusing instead on individual functional achievements.
PDC collaborates with companies to identify the project management structure that will work for you, moving beyond the traditional functional approach to a balanced matrix, project matrix, or heavyweight approach. With the right structure in place, we work with you to define roles, responsibilities, and performance metrics. We show you how to run a collaborative team effort that empowers members and ensures decision making. The idea of collaboration flows upward as we work with product review boards and management to define a clear contract with the teams.
Well managed cross-functional teams can propel your company to faster time-to-market, increased market share, and stronger company unity.
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Partnering with Suppliers
Effective management of the supply chain is a huge competitive factor for many companies. PDC has found that it's not technology itself but rather the way in which products are delivered that can make a profound difference.
Companies such as Dell Computer and Hewlett Packard have managed the supply chain to keep product costs low, ability to customize high, and delivery time fast. They can introduce new products very rapidly and in very high volumes. Their secret? Developing their products for an efficient supply chain.
Partnering with suppliers requires up-front planning, creative thinking, critical analysis of make/buy decisions, and creation of a link between your supply chain strategy and product design and development. Effective supplier integration strategies give you the insight to know that a more expensive component can save money in areas like inventory control and shipping.
PDC can help you improve your competitive edge by integrating suppliers for designing, developing, manufacturing, and supplying products. As in other arenas, our collaborative thinking sets us apart. We offer a step-by-step prescriptive approach to help you improve your supplier management and to build a supplier management organization.
Our analysis of best practices has shown that 95 percent of the time supply chain problems are actually product design problems. We help you:
- assess your current supply chain and determine how it affects your bottom line;
- develop an improved supply chain strategy; and
- define roles, responsibilities, and rules of engagement.
We also help you implement effective supply chain strategies that incorporate supply chain considerations during the product design and development process, including:
- exploring opportunities for postponement manufacturing, designing for outsourcing and design for testability;
- developing methods for working with suppliers including structuring the relationship and contract; and
- working with your R&D department, product developers and materials department to redesign and implement design for supply chain mentality by incorporating best-in-class fundamentals.
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