How much does poor collaboration cost your company?
Tech-Clarity’s eBook, What’s the Cost of Poor Collaboration? examines this topic for product development, sharing survey results from 155 manufacturers. Collaboration impacts every part of product development, and products cannot be developed or brought to market without it. While collaboration can be abstract and hard to measure, it’s impact can be significant, especially when it is poor. The research reveals how it impacts your product design and development processes. It also identifies six areas of opportunity for collaboration improvements that can boost product profitability for your company.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor, Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS (registration required).
Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- What’s Most Important for Design Team Success
- The Cost of Poor Collaboration on Engineers
- The Cost of Poor Collaboration on the Business
- Why Collaboration is So Critical
- Collaboration Requirements Have Increased
- Identifying Best Practices
- 1. Improve Engineering Efficiency
- 2. Recognize Collaboration Requirements
- 3. Provide Non-CAD Users Visibility to CAD
- 4. Improve Engineering / Manufacturing Collaboration
- 5. Connect Engineers and Simulation Analysts throughout the Design Process
- 6. Support Market Validation with Improved Customer Collaboration
- Recommendations
- About the Research
- Acknowledgments
Executive Summary
Collaboration Impacts Engineering Efficiency
Survey results show that engineering efficiency is the top goal for product development success. Effective collaboration is critical for improving efficiency, yet many companies struggle with it, while others don’t recognize the underlying connection between the two.
While poor collaboration is not a new problem, its cost has never been higher. Today’s complex products and
the ecosystems we develop them in have raised collaboration needs so much, 40% of engineering time is now directly impacted by their ability to work together. With this much time affected, poor collaboration can cost companies significantly. While many companies struggle with steep competition, shrinking margins, and uncertain economic times, this is a risk few can afford.
Poor Collaboration has a Business Cost
Unfortunately, poor collaboration is so common, engineers report they work with outdated data 28% of the time. This results in more rework, delays, and errors. These negative business impacts mean lower-quality products, higher costs, missed deadlines, and delays in time to market.
In fact, what has traditionally worked in the past is no longer enough to stay competitive in today’s market. An overwhelming 93% of companies report they need to improve collaboration with different groups. On average, engineers say they collaborate with 21 people on simple products and 35 for more complex products. Collaborators include other engineers, manufacturing, suppliers, customers, product managers, and more. On top of all the other design responsibilities, that’s a lot of people to manage, work to keep track of, and risk for errors, without helpful solutions in place. No wonder the cost of poor collaboration is so high!
New Opportunities for Solutions
Many companies just live with their collaboration challenges, but as collaboration needs increase, these problems become harder and harder to ignore. As new technologies, such as the cloud and innovation platforms, break down silos and collaboration barriers, companies can benefit from new approaches to solve these challenges. Those who do should gain a competitive advantage.
Recommendations
Next Steps
Based on industry experience and research for this report, Tech-Clarity offers the following recommendations:
- Understand the true cost of poor collaboration on both engineers and the entire company.
- Invest in collaboration improvements to increase engineering efficiency.
- Recognize the significance of collaboration requirements on engineers from the number of people involved, different departments, and processes impacted.
- Do not overlook the importance of engineering collaboration with non-CAD users.
- Ensure excellent collaboration between engineering and manufacturing to overcome knowledge gaps and support seamless hand-offs.
- Support effective collaboration between design engineers and simulation analysts to empower engineers to catch problems and design more competitive products.
- Incorporate customer collaboration into product development processes to support ongoing market validation and reduce the risk around market uncertainty.
- Consider modern technologies, such as cloud and an innovation platform, to support and enable better collaboration processes.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the research and does not contain the full content. A link to download the full report is available here.
If you have difficulty obtaining a copy of the report, please contact us.