Collaborative engineering gives organizations the ability to design, build, and service anywhere.
By utilizing a collaborative engineering approach, stakeholders throughout the entire supply chain process are now able to work collaboratively. This allows teams to resolve conflicts, create solutions, and make critical decisions for any given design or project. In today's environment of remote work and solutions, distributed workforces, and supply chain overloads - collaborative engineering has become increasingly crucial.
Collaborative engineering brings teams together early in the engineering process. Collaborative approaches are essential in engaging the best resources, despite where they're located. These approaches are also imperative to enable a product to be manufactured wherever.
Collaboration is vital for business efficiency, improved innovation, successful product design, increased effectiveness, and more. Without collaborative engineering and collaboration across all departments and third parties, engineering processes can become extremely costly. Your time-to-market can also be driven downwards.
Even before the pandemic, engineering teams were beginning to become increasingly dispersed. Product complexity requires an increase in collaboration - often outside of general, centralized design. In addition to that, globalization and cost pressures keep engineering teams further dispersed. During the pandemic, this has been taken to extremes - due to remote work, travel bans, cross-country team collaboration, etc.
Often times, manufacturers turn to a robust Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software solution to foster a collaborative engineering approach. With the right PLM software solution, a digital thread of information is enabled to flow through all levels of an enterprise.
When utilizing the right PLM system, you're allowed to both design and build anywhere - through the various tools and best practices that allow for efficient, secure collaboration. It also presents the ability to accommodate geographically distributed teams, as well as allow configuration and change management to occur globally, in real-time, with the most up-to-date information.
In addition to this, non-expert Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) users can also leverage modern PLM apps to view up-to-date information on product and enterprise application data. An example of this would be ThingWorx Navigate, an app that facilitates real-time collaboration utilizing features that allow real-time reviewing, approving, commenting, feedback, and more. Combining online data from multiple systems lets users see all of the information in-context.
To implement collaborative engineering, you must bring all of your key stakeholders into the engineering flow to allow all individuals in the enterprise to be included in the supply chain process. This way, all stakeholders can assist in creating solutions, resolving conflicts, and making critical decisions.
Overall, collaborative engineering is a strong foundation for a standardized process that allows for collaborative production planning and manufacturing - anywhere and everywhere.