3DEXPERIENCE: collaboration is the challenge

29-09-2021 | Posted by Principia

The future is collaborative. The economy and the environment will only survive if those participating in the processes collaborate and strive to optimise efficiency in the use of resources, normally scarce and expensive.

The same happens with companies. A coordinated management of needs and requirements is essential to achieve efficient solutions, increase speed, and reduce costs. Less energy consumption, more reuse of materials, faster results.

What happens when we need to manufacture complex machinery with thousands of parts? How to achieve speed in managing the project and deal with the different versions generated?

The time to market is ever more important, whether to overtake the competition and capitalise our investment in innovation, or to give immediate answers to new and urgent problems such as those generated by a pandemic.

At the onset of a project in an industrial firm, technical teams generate the basic information, files, drawings, 3D data, certifications; all this will be updated as the project evolves.

After a first version, access is given to other participants (design, management, finance, etc.) so that they can contribute their knowledge, and modifications are introduced, leading to version 2. All parties involved must be informed that a second version exists. Some will maintain traceability, but others will not, with the familiar consequences: mistakes in documents, use of superseded versions, ignored modifications, and project versions with incomplete information.

This means time, hence money. It lengthens the process, makes it more expensive, and hinders the incorporation of innovative elements because the focus is on recovering from process failures. We lag the competition, the market, and our own company.

The perception of the cost of solving this problem is often excessive. There are options to suit different types of organisations and it is easy to see that the ROI (return on investment) is high by simply analysing employees’ time. The productivity of staff in design or administration is not usually assessed, but current tools allow analysing the resources consumed by each project and observing the considerable savings from working on the cloud.

The cloud is essential for an effective collaboration. It provides connectivity through platforms able to operate with native and external applications, and it allows incorporating all the elements and people involved to eliminate wastes of time and coordination failures.

Collaborative platforms such as 3D Experience are able to manage integrally all the project information, the sole source of truth, and allow integrating talent in a different way: since sharing information no longer requires physical proximity, talent can be incorporated wherever it is. The best professionals can collaborate, irrespective of location, in multidisciplinary teams of excellence.

Yet another tool to add value to our processes and manage innovation in a clear value environment within an uncertain global world.