Summit hears of globalised product development

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jun 30, 2005

Anil Chitkara, Vice President Global Product Development Strategy at PTC, hosted a collaborative workshop on global product development at Europe's first independent cross-industry PLM forum.

Anil Chitkara, Vice President Global Product Development Strategy at PTC, hosted a collaborative workshop on global product development at Europe's first independent cross-industry product lifecycle management (PLM) forum in London last week.

In this workshop, PTC explored the "what", "why", "where", and the "how" of global product development (GPD), and shared some decision frameworks that manufacturing companies can use when developing their own GPD strategy.

The European PLM Summit 2005 gathered leading companies together for the very first time to learn the lessons of PLM implementations from world-class organisations.

Global product development is the use of a globally distributed product development model, addressing the needs of manufacturing companies to deliver more products around the world with higher quality and lower cost.

Companies globalise their product development to become more efficient, which can allow companies to lower the overall cost of developing products or add capacity to improve their engineering productivity.

The benefits of GPD include heightened innovation through the rebalancing of creative and administrative engineering tasks, faster time to market by using effective "time zone" working, access to additional capacity and capabilities, and the tuning of international products to suit fast-growing, local markets.

"Manufacturing globalised in 1980s followed by call centres in the mid-1990s, now product development is poised to go global", said Anil Chitkara, Vice President GPD Strategy at PTC.

"Global product development will ramp up quickly - PTC findings show that 90% of manufacturers surveyed plan to 'offshore' approximately 10-30% of engineering within 3 years".

"There is a compelling need for a PLM technology infrastructure and new processes to tie together disparate product development activities".

"As manufacturers distribute their product development operations, they have created numerous new challenges around collaboration and control of their product development operation within their enterprise and with design partners globally".