Manufacturers of all sizes increasingly find themselves either leading a global business or functioning as a small cog in another company’s worldwide operation. As a result, collaboration across time zones has become a core facet of production operations. It’s no longer a question of whether engineers and operators will need to collaborate for success, but how they will collaborate and when.

With collaboration so ubiquitous, numerous technologies have grown up around this business process. Most provide a positive boost for intra- and inter-company collaborative efforts in terms of ease of communication, ability to work on single documents from multiple locations, and cost savings on travel, just to name a few of the most obvious benefits.

However, when speaking with engineers about their cross-geography collaboration experience, it’s clear that the collaborative process, even with the aid of technology, is far from perfect — or even precise. The ever-changing nature of company affiliations, personalities and regional economies will always see to that.

Avoiding the four most common collaborative manufacturing missteps will go a long way toward ensuring the success of your current and future collaborative efforts.

1. Lack of Perspective

Setting the business context for a cross-geography collaboration effort needs to be viewed as step 0 for any collaborative effort, as it needs to take place before any other steps commence.

“The biggest mistake most companies make is in it not looking at collaborative manufacturing as an enterprise issue,” says Rob Gellings, P.E.,
senior vice president of enterprise integration with system integrator company Maverick Technologies, Columbia, Ill.. “They let each facility go off and do their own thing and wind up with something that can’t be leveraged for any other purpose. True collaboration really begins with developing that corporate team with representatives from each area.”

As a corporate enterprise concern, true collaboration is something that has to be constantly monitored and maintained with strict change procedures and by people with a good understanding of the overall requirements. It’s not an automated, software-driven application that runs itself requiring you to check the dashboard on occasion. Marc Leroux, collaborative production manager at automation systems vendor ABB, Columbus, Ohio, says that he sees this set-it-and-leave-it approach employed more often than not.

“Collaboration is a tactical engineering tool for maintenance and operations,” Leroux says. “You have to understand the scope of what you’re trying to achieve, but this is typically not done in practice.”

2. Unclear Business Definitions

Once the groundwork for successful collaboration is set by placing the proper perspective on the project, the next step is to identify what’s driving the collaborative effort and why.

“This sounds simple, but these drivers will dictate how the collaboration will actually work,” says Steve Bashada, vice president of TeamCenter Applications for Siemens PLM, Cincinnati, Ohio. “Most companies don’t go through the process of examining these drivers by exploring basic issues such as: Is this a joint venture? Is it an OEM [original equipment manufacturer] supply chain collaboration? Is this the result of a merger?”

Such simple project framework questions are simply not asked all that often. But, Bashada says, you have to understand these issues upfront because they are going to affect the lifecycle of the collaboration. “The lifecycle might mean that today’s joint venture could dissolve in 18 months, then come the questions of where’s the data, how will it get taken down, who controls the IDs, security, etc. People often think through all the setup points, but not how to take it in the other direction when it’s over,” he says.

Though this type of problem is more common with inter-company collaborations, it can happen within companies too, Bashada says. For example, when manufacturing in one country moves to another facility in another geography or, say, if there’s a new design center established in Korea.  “It happens all the time at OEMs and with their supply chain peers,” he says.

3. Technology Landmines

This aspect of collaborative manufacturing contains multiple areas where missteps commonly occur. Since they all fit under the software/technology umbrella, I’ll list them all here for easy reference.

Be careful about what you as for. “Don’t ask a software supplier if their product can do ‘x’ because the answer is always ‘yes’,” says Gellings of Maverick Technologies. “Too many companies don’t drive software implementations based on business objectives; instead they get enamored with the technology and not how it supports the business issue at stake.”

As a corollary to this point, Bashada adds that there is often the mistake of developing your collaborative ...