May 1997, Volume 14, No. 5 Concurrent Engineering Adds Smarts to PDM

Based on concurrent engineering techniques, the state of work being done by others will be visible to all product team members in real time. Conventional product data management (PDM), by contrast, has focused on managing information already released from engineering rather than on improving design control during the dynamic front end of the development process.

Collaborative Work Management is designed to manage the lifecycle evolution of any project deliverable. It will empower process owners to model and manage their own processes. It also will enable project managers to aggregate, synchronize and build dependencies between independent processes, creating a process hierarchy that represents a cohesive project.

Tektronix Inc. (Wilsonville, Ore.; http://www.tektronix.com), a manufacturer of measuring instruments, printers and networking systems, has been an early user of the new technology. According to Mike Massey, engineering applications development manager for Tektronix's measurement business division, "Where complex processes involving different groups and functions exist, it is critical that the people involved work together closely if we are to expedite results and avoid errors. This collaborative technology will enable these groups and individuals to model the processes they are responsible for and provide a means of linking these lower level processes together, allowing the entire network of processes to interact and remain controlled. This decentralizes process definition and provides a bottom-up method of building more complex processes, which is not possible with conventional workflow approaches."

Massey sees concurrent engineering techniques allowing Tektronix to solve complex business problems one process at a time. "This technology will provide us with improved flexibility to change our processes to meet the inevitable shifts required to stay competitive."

Workgroup Technology has added a new wrinkle to the concurrent engineering arena with its concept of "intelligent deliverables." Collaborative Work Management embeds a deliverable's process steps within its definition such that a deliverable "knows" what steps it must follow during its lifecycle. This enables individual process owners to define the processes for the deliverables they control. This empowerment captures the knowledge of key workers and frees them from dependency on centralized workflow administrative support.

Collaborative Work Management also supports the aggregation of individual processes into a process hierarchy. This enables project managers to assemble the required processes, synchronize them and build dependencies between them. The result is a cohesive process configuration with built-in rules governing its execution. This building block approach to configuring processes provides the flexibility for adding, modifying and reconfiguring processes to meet the ever-changing needs of the product development process, particularly during the early pre-release stages. In addition, whole processes can be reused, template-style, on new projects, ensuring that best practices are employed.

Collaborative Work Management records the progress of each deliverable as it moves through its lifecycle. This real-time status is available from any user's desktop so that work progress is visible. Project managers will be able to monitor and track the real-time status of their projects and identify bottlenecks earlier.

One of the goals of concurrent engineering, of course, is that individual participants can better understand how their work affects others. In addition, critical information such as elapsed time can be automatically captured at each process stage. Post-process analysis and reengineering can be supported by examining the process history.