Accelerating Innovation
The competitive necessity of collaboration is undisputed. Manufacturers outsource up to 80% of product design to their supplier network, and must be able to bring together their extended enterprise and design chain partners throughout the concept stage to optimize innovation, capitalize on tight market opportunities, eliminate design errors and associated risks, and maximize profits.
At one end of the value chain, customer involvement in product development ensures that the product being developed meets or exceeds expectations. At the opposite end of the value chain, OEMs working closely with their supplier network ensures that the final product incorporates the optimal components and multiple dimensions of product knowledge from these suppliers, enabling companies to deliver compelling, market-dominating products within critical windows of opportunity.
Levels of Innovation
Manufacturers and their supplier networks are under pressure to optimize their product innovation while balancing their portfolio between three levels of innovation. Research indicates that market dominance requires the right mix of three innovation levels:
- Linear Innovation—enhancements and additions to current product lines, 20%;
- Customer-driven Innovation—custom-configured products to customer specifications, 30%;
- Radical Innovation—enables manufacturers to continually break new ground, create paradigm-shifting new breakthrough products and expand into new market segments, 50%;
Innovation Management
The Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center—challenged with fusing ideas and capabilities of a geographically dispersed team and quickly converting concepts into products by bringing clarity into the innovation process—sought a collaborative product innovation management solution to maximize number of programs-to-market, reduce “entry ticket” and shorten cycle time by 50%. Centric Innovation enabled Volvo to achieve its goal of optimizing consensus-building and decision-making and therefore being able to focus more time on the actual innovation process by bringing together diversified teams from many time zones, thereby synthesizing more possibilities.
The Innovation Center features three levels—executive portfolio management, project management, and end-user collaboration. Team members can work with design-chain partners to brainstorm, define, and validate product possibilities, review concepts, and ultimately present new product concepts to executives for go-to-market decisions. Project managers can track and monitor activities and deliverables, and executives can manage their product development portfolio. This environment parallels the physical world of war rooms and project rooms and facilitates the creation of more unique and innovative product possibilities, which are then defined, explored and ultimately validated. This enables manufacturers and their supplier network to increase new product successes by 200 percent through harvesting, testing, and converting more “raw” ideas into market-dominating products, ensuring the development of more innovative products within critical windows of opportunity.
Design-to-Order
Another industry leader that emphasizes customer input is Square D, the North American flagship brand for Schneider Electric. Square D required a solution that would increase the company’s overall growth rate by optimizing its custom-order engineering process. Their deployment of Centric Innovation Design-to-Order enabled them to significantly accelerate customized product output and reduce associated costs, while enhancing customer responsiveness and increasing satisfaction.
Square D is now able to work together with its customers during the development process and collaboratively validate product functionality in the Centric Innovation 3D project environment. This enables manufactures to maximize end-product innovation. Through this solution, Square D increases efficiency by drastically accelerating order fulfillment time from approximately eight weeks to a few days while achieving an increase in volume business by 20% to 30%. Other manufacturers are able to cut response time for custom-configured products by at least 50% through rapid development and validation of a Concept BOM (cBOM). D2O adds velocity to the product delivery process by organizing the extended team around a total product objective, quickly identifying customer needs, mapping to possible alternatives, leveraging corporate assets, and digitally validating product functionality throughout development. It enables customers to see these results more quickly and participate in the product’s development, assuring customer acceptance by developing products that meet or exceed their requirements.
Functional Prototyping
Siemens Transportation Systems sought a collaborative product innovation solution to enable its team to identify design errors during the ideation phase, thus offsetting the need to construct expensive physical prototypes. The result: maximization of innovation potential and an economization of the process.
Leveraging Centric Innovation Functional Prototyping, Siemens digitally validates new concepts and the total product functionality of complete train systems to quickly correct any possible errors—dramatically decreasing development time and costs, as well as optimizing innovation. Functional Prototyping enables Siemens to perform hundreds of “what if” scenarios and takes digital mock-up to a new level—beyond simple form and fit of geometry—providing true insights as to the product’s intended function through synthesizing behaviors and product structure. Additionally, it is the first solution to integrate every aspect of mechanical, electro-mechanical and electronics—”mechatronics”—processes so that multi-disciplinary teams can collaboratively validate product performance throughout development and identify optimal product decisions. Functional Prototyping maximizes innovation and enables rapid partnering and solution development across the marketplace.
Through complete system-level digital simulation, manufacturers are able to reduce physical prototypes by 50% and eliminate errors. By identifying and eliminating design conflicts early in the concept phase, time to market accelerates, and costs are reduced. The solution includes the industry’s most advanced technology to connect distributed data located in proprietary sources, and roll this data up into a master product definition. This also enables the re-use of content alternatives in multiple scenarios. The master model can be “zoned” and partitioned to key team members; unique data probes synchronize distributed development. For the first time, rigid and flexible body analysis can be brought together in a single environment for complete validation.
ROI—Return on Innovation
Centric Innovation provides manufacturers many tangible and intangible benefits. These can be measured by looking at the return on investment, or an even better measure would be the “Return On Innovation.” The benefits of Centric Innovation are staggering:
- Bring 200% more successful products to market by leveraging more new product ideas.;
- Maximize customer-driven innovation through rapid response and validation of custom-configured products and increase business volume by 50%.;
- Maximize competitive advantage through early validation of optimal product concepts, reduce physical prototyping costs by 50%, and eliminate errors.;
- Reduce product development cycles by up to 50 % through optimizing supplier network activities. ;
What Customers Say About Centric Software
Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center
“At Volvo, we were faced with the challenge of assessing ideas from geographically dispersed teams in order to quickly turn a multitude of concepts into products. Centric Innovation provided the Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center with a unique 3D, digital, collaborative project environment in which teams could meet and review concepts in the context of new product programs, and present these to executives for go-to-market decisions.
This streamlined our processes, and increased our capacity. With Innovation Management, Volvo Monitoring and Concept Center can significantly decrease concept cycle time, allowing for more focus on the upstream innovation process.”
—Benny Sommerfeld, Concept Business Manager
Square D Engineering
“At Square D, we are committed to continually enriching the customer experience and ensuring that their needs are not only met, but exceeded. This is particularly important for our customized, designed-to-order business, which requires significant hands-on engineering involvement. Through our implementation of Centric Innovation, we incorporate the customer into the development process—increasing product value as the ‘voice of the customer’ is heard from the project’s outset, and concepts are digitally validated throughout development. This increased efficiency enables our team to drastically decrease order fulfillment time from as much as eight weeks to a few days, and therefore increase volume of business achieved by 20 to 30%.”
—Dave Guidette, VP of Engineering
Siemens TS HR
"Our cooperation with Centric Software will further our innovation potential by drastically accelerating development cycles, guaranteeing Siemens TS an enormous competitive advantage in today’s race to cut time to market and increase market share.”
—Wilhelm Waidmann, Head of Product Management
Centric Software, Inc. accelerates innovation by empowering manufacturers to maximize the collective competencies of their extended enterprise and supplier network to deliver compelling, market-dominating products within critical windows of opportunity. Its flagship product, Centric Innovation™, integrates all disparate business and technical information into a single unified environment—the “Innovation Center.” Centric Software’s Collaborative Product Innovation (CPI) software solutions—Innovation Management, Design-to-Order and Functional Prototyping—enable manufacturers to optimize all three levels of innovation—linear, customer-driven and radical innovation.
Centric Software is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and provides sales and support services to its customers through its offices worldwide. For additional information, please visit the Web site atCentric Software