Social Business Collaboration can help companies develop better products. It can also help them more effectively include their supply chain in product development to improve innovation. Product development is a team sport and benefits from collaboration across the supply chain. Formal collaboration approaches such as PDM or PLM are effective, but are sometimes worked around because they don’t support ad-hoc processes as well as social media. Also, setting up new users such as suppliers can take more time and effort than people are willing to invest. Ad-hoc file sharing is easier, but puts IP at risk and creates duplicate data that leads to mistakes, scrap, and rework.
The episode of Tech-Clarity TV expands on a previous episode of Tech-Clarity TV on Social Business Collaboration and the conundrum between control and free-flowing information exchange available from social computing. It explains the pluses and minuses of different approaches to collaborate with supply chain partners. For more information on Social Business Collaboration, please take a look at our white paper Issue in Focus: Social Business Collaboration and the Product Lifecycle: Combining the Collaborative Power of Social Media with PLM, sponsored by Nuage. I hope you enjoy the video.
This is a good introduction of where social business collaboration meets traditional product development approaches. Great primer – thank you!
puts IP at risk and creates duplicate data that leads to mistakes, scrap, and rework.
2SK170
The IP risk is potentially real, but my experience shows that the alternatives are riskier. Dropbox, e-mail, etc. are likely less secure than a purpose-built social computing platform that is designed for security.
I don’t understand your point about duplicate data. When people share information outside of Engineering they usually create attachments in e-mail and then you never know which is the latest version of the file. When you have one version of the file in the social tool you aren’t creating additional duplicates every time someone replies. The alternative is to share directly from your master data (in PDM, PLM, doc management, etc.) which can be a very good option but requires users to be set up and discourages ad-hoc collaboration.