InformationWeek

At Cadence Design Systems, Inc., also a NexPrise customer, ipTeam gave the company's information appliance design group a secure extranet to facilitate collaboration among 23 engineers located in offices in Santa Clara, Calif., Portland, Ore., and Cape Cod, Mass., as well as at other locations around the world. The group, which develops custom embedded systems for products such as wireless mobile devices and point-of-sale systems, uses the tool to better track changes in its design process. "Every project comes down to four or five difficult problems," says Cadence program manager John Flavin, in San Jose, Calif. "You end up sending E-mail back and fourth. IpTeam allows that to happen in one spot with one historic track record."

While the Web is the driving force behind many new collaborative business processes, technology isn't the only change to which companies have to adjust. The biggest hurdle, say analysts, is getting users to exploit the technology and a new work style. "Some companies are ingrained in years and years of cultural bureaucracy and steeped in the idea that they have to do everything themselves," Gartner Group's Burdick says. "They can't keep relationships with suppliers in a little black box." He says companies must take better advantage of trading partners for innovation and find ways to quickly and easily bring new suppliers into the fold.

"We realize we're changing the fundamental way the company works," Seagate's Speidel says. "We realize we have to communicate and get people involved. The biggest surprise is how creative people are once you put a tool in their hands. People were doing things we didn't even foresee."

By next year, Group Schneider plans to share parts classification data with its suppliers via Web extensions to its Aspect Development parts-management system. By allowing suppliers to see how many kinds of parts it's buying, Group Schneider hopes suppliers can help it consolidate and streamline purchasing. "Using the expertise of your suppliers affords you the ability to do supplier-value analysis and uncovers cost-reduction opportunities," Guidette says.

That's not to say technology issues don't exist. By its very nature, a more-collaborative process means exposing coveted intellectual property to many more people within and beyond a company's four walls. That means careful management over who has access to what information, particularly when customers, subcontractors, and suppliers are looking at bids, designs, and developments from different sides of the table. "That's why we're going a little slower," Speidel says. "There has to be encryption, authorization, etc. We won't turn something on unless all those security issues are buttoned up."

Analysts say software vendors have built security into their systems and that most security breaches happen within a company's firewalls. Still, security is a top concern. "When you're talking about putting your design secrets on the Web, you have to be careful about who has access and how it gets distributed," analyst Burdick says.

An even more pressing issue, he says, is reliability and performance of engineering networks. Burdick says it's not unusual for CAD systems to crash a couple of times a day, which becomes a big problem if customers and suppliers are relying on access to the system. Flavin says ipTeam helped solve one performance problem at Cadence, but created another. "We're no longer sending E-mails with giant attachments," he says. "But we've got data out on the server which you still have to download. There's an hour and a half every day when the network is very slow."

Another concern, one that's inherent to any major software project, is managing the implementation. At Group Schneider, implementing Aspect took much longer than anticipated--18 months rather than the six originally planned. The data conversion involved in moving detailed information about millions of parts to a new system was the biggest time sink. "Everyone has to face the integrity of their own data sets," Guidette says. "Aspect did provide tools for that, and we're getting the value out of the system. I'm just disappointed at the length of the implementation."

Seagate's implementation, which involves several software packages and multiphase projects, has been in progress for nine months and won't be finished for another two years. One of the company's greatest challenges is building integration among software systems from IQXpert, i2 Technologies, Oracle, and SDRC. The company is using application integration tools from IBM and Tibco Software Inc. to connect all the pieces. The integration will help Seagate cut down on manual data entry and reduce the chance for errors.

"If you're going to do fast decision making, you have to tie these together," Speidel says. "A major piece of the project is linking applications. All the systems are changing independently, and we change how we utilize each system. It's a real challenge to keep it all synchronized and moving the same direction."

While most companies are in the trenches hashing out the technical and cultural issues, some are dreaming of even more ways to push the envelope. The next wave, analysts say, could bring consumers closer to the design process: Some day, consumers shopping online will be able to generate a model of a product on a Web site, adding components and choosing stylistic features. Behind the scenes, all the original data that used to sit inside CAD systems will be reconstituted with a new Web front end with which the consumer can interact.

Some companies are already moving in that direction. Sony Corp. lets customers choose the operator controls on its PlayStation2 joystick online before they buy it, for instance. And many automakers are starting to let customers design their own cars rather than making them pick from what's in inventory.

"We've taken baby steps in that direction with Dell and Compaq," Burdick says, referring to the ability for consumers to configure the components of PCs. "The next step is personalize-to-order."

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