ADVANCING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN THE CLOUD
Although there are many examples of an individual discovering, creating, or stumbling upon an innovation, the process of innovation does not take place in a vacuum. No designer is an island. Even in cases where one person is credited with an invention or innovation, behind the scenes those innovators successfully collaborated with others, synthesizing the knowledge, ideas, views, suggestions, and recommendations of friends, colleagues, and stakeholders to refine their inspiration, guide their creativity, and focus their vision toward a practical application and successful outcome. Creating innovative products today is no different, except that the time allotted for completing this synthesis is undoubtedly much shorter. Great ideas can come from many places, and manufacturers face the challenge of how to bring their best people together so they can effectively collaborate as part of a product development team without incurring the cost of bringing them all to a single location, installing more software, or purchasing additional hardware.
As the economy becomes increasingly global and technology continues to rapidly advance, product development organizations recognize the need to compress product development cycles. By using a cloud-based system such as 3DEXPERIENCE WORKS, manufacturers can connect team members from any location, providing the collaboration and communication platform that designers and engineers need to engage in outside-the-box thinking, bounce ideas around, and participate in the give-and-take interaction that can result in innovation. The ability to easily collaborate in this way in real time—with data transparently managed in the background—can help organizations fast-track product development and increase productivity.
While the trend toward cloud-based applications of all kinds continues to accelerate, the first step toward making that transition is for product development teams to leverage existing, integrated desktop solutions, like SOLIDWORKS design software, by using them with compatible cloud-based design and engineering tools, like 3DEXPERIENCE WORKS. Regardless of the function, design teams can connect SOLIDWORKS models and tools with the cloud-based platform to conduct industrial design, mechanical design, data management, and a range of downstream functions and deliverables, including simulation and validation, documentation, product imagery creation, and tooling preparation.
An important ancillary benefit of a cloud-based environment such as the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is the substantial reduction in IT costs. Because the tools and data reside in the cloud, you won’t need to install them, upgrade hardware, or conduct updates and fixes. With the data residing in the cloud instead of on an individual user’s computer, all updates are conducted automatically and users need only a current web browser to view and review data, and, depending on the solution set, access and use these tools, and collaborate with colleagues, partners, suppliers, consultants, and anyone else in the product development network.
BOOST INNOVATION, PRODUCTIVITY VIA CLOUD-BASED COLLABORATION
While innovation in product development has become the lifeblood of many of today’s leading manufacturers, it must be balanced with other objectives, such as faster times to market and holding the line on product development costs. For a product innovation to make a splash in the market, it must be brought to market first without bankrupting the company in the process. In other words, manufacturers need a cloud-based platform to collaborate efficiently, fast-track product development, and control product development costs while introducing innovative products and features to market at the same time. With a cloud-based platform, manufacturers can more easily balance these sometimes conflicting objectives.
Innovation Demands Collaboration
In order to innovate consistently, efficiently, and effectively, product design teams must collaborate. It’s the only way that the team can distill all of the pertinent information—such as the voice of the customer, input from suppliers and partners, design ideas and concepts, etc.—into an innovative design. In addition to synthesizing information on the front end of development, designers and engineers need to collaborate so they can incorporate valuable input, feedback, and insights into design iterations in real time. Using SOLIDWORKS tools in concert with 3DEXPERIENCE WORKS browser-based solutions, product design teams can more tightly focus the development path, leverage the knowledge that is widely distributed across the organization, and even uncover hidden, unknown talent. In order for collaboration to generate innovation efficiently, it must be seamless and operate in real time, while eliminating geographic, device access, and time barriers from the collaborative process.
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DEVELOPING BETTER PRODUCTS IN THE CLOUD 3DEXPERIENCE WORKS Accelerates Collaboration, Innovation, and Time to Market
