If you want to learn how to get your products to market faster, you might want to take a lesson from Venkat Ghanta of Cisco Systems.
Ghanta, Cisco's senior manager for physical design engineering, improved his department's productivity by 400 percent, by moving from a parallel to an interactive development methodology.
"We can now design a 90-nanometer chip with 1.2 million components in the amount of time it once took us to design a 130-nanometer chip with 300,000 components," he says.
Companies have been working hard for years to get their products to market faster and stay ahead of their competition. They have spent an estimated $4 billion a year on software tools to help them do this, according to research from various sources. (See chart below.)
Although engineers have used technology tools for decades to help them collaborate with peers and suppliers dispersed around the globe, some companies are putting a different spin on some technologies. They are implementing Web portals, interactive design and document management technologies. Whatever technology tool they use, the goal is the same: successful collaboration that gets their products to market faster.
"A major challenge for nearly every electronics firm today is how to handle the sharing of product information between cross-functional teams across organizational boundaries and even among partners and suppliers," says Mike Burkett, an analyst who covers collaborative software for AMR Research.
Here's how some electronics firms are using collaboration software to stay productive and profitable in today's superspeed markets.
Challenge: build teams that bootstrap products
Electronics firms used to treat design, development and manufacturing as a series of steps in a preordained progression. Although the sequential design methodology, with its multiple checkpoints and reviews, did help control quality, it also ensured that a product might take months or years to reach the market.
More electronics firms are now decreasing their time to market by breaking the sequential development process into parallel paths. That's what Kamalesh Ruparel of Cisco did. Until a couple of years ago, the lead designer for a custom chip project at Cisco would typically break the design into component parts and assign a separate team to each "subchip." "When the teams had completed their work, the lead designer integrated the separate parts into the final design," Ruparel explains.
But it turned out that parallel design had its issues as well: It proved brittle when problems occurred toward the end of the cycle. "Certain issues, such as timing closure, kept cropping up when the lead designer stitched the different parts together," Ruparel says. Those problems had the potential to billow through a project, causing unacceptable delays in releasing the product.
The solution for Cisco was to move from a parallel to an interactive development methodology, using SOC Encounter, a Cadence Design Systems product that combines RTL synthesis, silicon virtual prototyping and full-chip implementation into a single system. Ghanta says that one benefit of the product is that the lead designer "defines a hierarchical design structure within the context of which engineering teams can bootstrap the chip while being able to see each others' work."
"This allows the design team to accommodate the effects of interconnecting the various subchips from the very beginning so that you can see the light at the end of the tunnel (as it were) from the start," Ruparel says.
Similarly, Radstone, a U.K.-based developer of specialized avionics computers, DSPs and communications devices, ran smack against the limitation of a parallel design methodology, according to Ian McCormick, the company's CAD manager.
Even though his team consists of only 15 engineers, all located at the same facility, "we're still under pressure to complete projects more quickly all the time, even though our divide-and-conquer strategy (as we call it) has achieved some reductions in design cycle time," he explains. "We had to find some way to work twice as fast, short of having engineers work in their sleep."
Radstone implemented its interactive design methodology by using Xtreme, a product from Mentor Graphics that allows multiple engineers to work simultaneously on the same design database while viewing everyone else's progress in real time.
"You can actually watch the chip come together as multiple designers work on their various segments," he explains.
Although Radstone hasn't done any formal ROI, McCormick estimates that the interactive design methodology has reduced the amount of time it takes for his group to do product development. "We just completed a project in six weeks that previously would have taken three months," he says.
Challenge: build teams that span organizations
One of the tools that electronics firms most commonly implement to allow various organizations to collaborate is a document management system. At Cisco, for example, design teams make their application notes available to other groups through the company's intranet.
"We establish parameters about what should be published and which team members should have access," explains Ruparel. "This helps the designers work more closely with the back-end guys who do the testing and verification." Document management also helps integrate groups that might go maverick into the mainstream.
For example, analog designers are notorious for becoming isolated from their peers in digital design, because analog design (unlike digital design) has never been successfully automated, forcing analog engineers to use a completely different set of design tools. Even today, it's possible for an analog designer to be productive without using project management software, according to Robert A. Pease, analog design guru at National Semiconductor.
"I never use software and am not familiar with the kind of software we use," Pease says. "If management tells me I should do something, I do it. Somebody else tells the software that I did it, and the managers are happy."
Can you imagine a digital chip designer making a similar claim?
However, even analog designers can be made more productive through document management, according to Chris Collins, director of high-performance analog EDA at Texas Instruments. For example, TI uses a product called DesignSync from MatrixOne that makes project design information available to team members, regardless of location. "The real key to analog EDA 'automation' is to make analog designers work better together as human beings," Collins explains.
In an increasing number of electronics firms, though, document management isn't enough. "Everything in the electronics industry is getting more complicated, and the data management problems are truly enormous," says Burkett. "What's needed are tools that provide a framework to facilitate the internal custom development of products for a variety of design and manufacturing processes, throughout a product's life cycle," he adds.
A case in point is DALSA, a company that develops digital imaging products and provides specialized wafer foundry services.
"Product development across multiple organizations is particularly challenging here, because for the past decade, we've grown as much as 30 percent a year," says Roger Brooks, the company's director of information services. To make matters even more difficult, much of that growth took place through corporate acquisition, adding the extra complexity of legacy computer systems within the acquired firms. "We not only needed to address design complexity but any solution we implemented also had to be usable in a wide variety of engineering and computing environments," Brooks explains.
To pull teams together across organizational boundaries, DALSA implemented an intranet portal using technology from Plumtree, a software vendor recently acquired by BEA Systems. The DALSA portal provides not only a document management function but also a workflow system, custom-built so that DALSA teams can move projects from milestone to milestone within DALSA's multifaceted corporate environment. Because the portal is Web-based, it can link to tools and processes specific to a particular organization as well as act as a front end to DALSA's centralized corporate computers.
Brooks measures the impact of the portal according to the number of employees who access it. "When we started down this path, we decided that 500 log-ins a month would justify the expense of building the portal," he says. "Today, the system handles more than 45,000 log-ins a month."
Challenge: build teams across oceans
Completing a project on time and on budget is particularly difficult when it requires the cooperation of geographically dispersed teams. First, there's the time zone hassle. An engineer who works 8:00 to 5:00 in New York is unlikely to be taking many conference calls with a colleague who works 8:00 to 5:00 in Bangalore.
But even when the time zones aren't wildly offset, getting engineers to collaborate when they're not physically located in the same building can be challenging.
"It can be very difficult to put complex products together when engineers can't stick their heads over the cubicle wall and chat," says George Thomas, a senior engineer who oversaw satellite electronics at the erstwhile Hughes Aircraft. "On one project, I had to travel from Los Angeles to Connecticut 50 times, and even then it was a nightmare trying to get everything to work correctly."
In addition to helping groups collaborate across organizational boundaries, sharing documents is essential to keep geographically dispersed teams working closely together. For example, IBM's Cell CPU development project used Lotus Notes, which functions as both an e-mail system and a document management system, to coordinate the activities of the IBM engineering team in Texas with Sony and Toshiba teams in Japan, according to Chekib Akrout, IBM's vice president of Game Processor Development.
Document management, although necessary, may not be sufficient. For the Cell project, for example, IBM deployed a wealth of proprietary tools, loosely grouped under the umbrella of IBM's Integrated Product Development (IPD) environment. "The methodology allows us to use a mix of generalized collaborative and specific engineering tools from IBM and elsewhere as part of the complete program management process," Akrout says.
Similarly, document management wasn't enough for Intermec Technologies, a company that designs and manufactures image-based data collection systems for distributors, warehouses and manufacturing facilities. "We have engineers in Iowa, Washington State and France," explains mechanical engineering manager Ryan White. "Although we have a critical need for good communications, we can't afford to spend the time and money to fly folks for weekly design and review meetings." Intermec uses Web conferencing tools, such as WebEx, from WebEx Communications, but the company needed something more that would let engineers collaborate on a day-to-day basis.
Intermec implemented the OneSpace family of products from CoCreate, a vendor that specializes in collaborative CAD. "The tools allow multiple engineers anywhere in the world to examine and modify a design in real time," explains White. "Because it's interactive, you can run the modeler live while you're talking to each other on the phone."
The ability to work remotely has benefited Intermec in at least one unexpected way: Intermec's OEM manufacturer, Singapore-based Venture Manufacturing, has discovered that it can use OneSpace to negotiate design changes required to increase manufacturability.
Challenge: build teams that span companies
An unintended consequence of the Internet Age has been a new set of expectations when it comes to component inventory. Companies that a few years ago were willing to tolerate monthly delivery now expect components to appear on the factory doorstep within hours. This widespread movement—so-called just-in-time inventory—has transformed the traditional supply chain of the electronics industry into an interlocked network of near-Byzantine complexity.
Because product life cycles, especially for consumer electronics, are measured in weeks rather than months, electronics firms understandably want to make last-minute tweaks to component orders to renew and change their products' features. Unfortunately, every tweak has the potential to ripple through the supply chain, forcing upstream suppliers to change their upstream orders.
"Shorter product life cycles are a sore spot for the industry," says Burkett of AMR. "If there's a change in an IC and a component becomes obsolete, it mandates (at the least) an updated bill of materials and a change in the schematic and the PCB layout, not to mention all the approvals required to actually implement the change."
In other words, supply chains, just like design chains, must become collaborative to run efficiently. To accomplish this, each firm in the chain must integrate its external sales activity with other corporate activities, such as manufacturing, accounting and engineering, and then make that data available, as appropriate, to the rest of the supply chain.
Unfortunately, most electronics firms are struggling so hard to integrate their own internal functions that they've left customer-facing applications—the ones that could provide the basis for a collaborative supply chain—to develop separately. Although most electronics sales departments use some form of customer relationship management (CRM) software, most of it consists of stand-alone applications, thereby isolating sales from the rest of the enterprise.
That was a major problem at Electronics Line USA, the U.S. subsidiary of a $40-million-a-year Israeli firm that designs, manufactures and markets a wide range of high-end security equipment.
"We tried several sales automation products, but the problem was integration," says Mike Davis, general manager. "We had multiple systems inside the company operating independently, which meant that if our sales reps wanted to check inventory for a customer, they actually had to print a paper list and check it by hand."
In addition, the engineering and manufacturing groups, which together employ about 200 engineers, used yet a third independent system, making it difficult for sales to request support for customers who encountered problems.
To bring these functions into alignment, Electronics Line implemented NetSuite, a software product from NetSuite Inc. that's similar to the gigantic enterprise resource planning (ERP) product suites from the likes of SAP and Oracle but scaled to fit the requirements of smaller firms. "Coming out of the box, with very little customization, NetSuite replaced three systems for us: customer support, inventory management and accounting," Davis explains.
As a result, his firm now has what Davis calls "360-degree collaboration," allowing Electronics Line to better serve its own customers and resellers as well as to work more closely with its upstream supply chain. This works to Electronic Line's advantage in several ways. First, the firm's customers can log onto Electronic Line's systems and check the status of their orders, even those that are already in transit. Second, Davis can quickly generate detailed reports that reveal buying patterns, thus allowing him to better tune the company's marketing and manufacturing priorities.
More important, the integrated system quickly surfaces any problem that might occur in shipped products, alerting Davis' engineering team of any defects in the components that go into their system. "Problems that the first-line tech support team can't solve are escalated to a design engineer, who can communicate directly with the customer and make changes in the design and assembly of the product, if necessary," Davis says.
According to Davis, the ability to create a more collaborative supply chain saved his company at least $200,000 a year, with the bulk of the savings coming from reductions in the cost of inventory management and tech support. For Davis, though, the cost savings is probably less important than how the collaborative environment has made his firm better able to take advantage of new opportunities. "We even implemented a Web store, a capability we originally had no plans to deploy," he says.
Although collaborative success stories are common in the electronics industry, the story isn't over yet. For one thing, there's no overarching architecture, similar to that enjoyed by e-mail and instant messaging, that would allow companies to easily combine collaborative applications. Unfortunately, many of the more advanced collaborative capabilities have been built deep inside engineering applications. Still, there's little question that electronics firms are making good use of the tools that are currently available.
"Electronics firms must manage products throughout their lifecycle more quickly and effectively than ever before," says Burkett. "They don't have time to wait until everything is perfect."
