Commentary: October 2005

By Gar Smyth, PTC

In today’s global economy the challenge for US SMBs (small and mid-size businesses) is to move from competing on the basis of offering low cost to competing on the basis of providing unique value, quality, and innovation. While SMBs have mastered MCAD, significant barriers beyond basic design still prevent them from better competing with low-cost overseas alternatives. One of the most significant of these barriers is sharing and integrating design information with the rest of the organization as well as with external partners. This communications barrier continues to impede the efforts of SMBs to be more successful in a global economy.

According to research perform by AMR (Boston, MA) this year, only a small number (5 to 10 percent) of SMB organizations have a tightly defined product design process that is integrated with other areas of the organization. Everyone from sales and marketing to manufacturing operations and from procurement to sourcing needs to be on the same page. The wide use of point solutions like Microsoft Project or Excel, the lack of integration between MCAD, CAM, and CAE tools, and the myriad custom-developed systems are now becoming obstacles to further increases in productivity.

Gar Smyth, PTC

As a result, SMBs are now trying to employ technology solutions that have traditionally been used by their larger counterparts to drive productivity gains. SMBs are now evaluating how capabilities such as advanced configuration management, change management, integrated concept design, integrated CAE, and CAM can help them differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Essentially, SMBs are looking to bring products to market faster and more efficiently by using technology that was once thought to be the domain of larger companies.

So what steps should an SMB considering a move to more integrated technology solutions take to ensure that they move in the right direction?

1. Identify where exactly process inefficiencies throw up barriers to your business growth objectives:

   • Is it in engineering and manufacturing?
    • Is it in engineering and sales/marketing?
    • Is it between engineering and suppliers?
    • Is it between engineering and customers?

2. Then, quantify how these inefficiencies are hurting overall business objectives.
3. Determine an appropriate investment amount based on anticipated benefits of a new system.
4. List your functional and technical requirements, making sure to align them with your business goals and your anticipated future expansion.
5. Evaluate solutions, taking into account training and data migration.

Technologies that solve complex process inefficiencies have, up to now, been expensive, slow to deploy, and difficult to use. Today’s MCAD, CAM, CAE, and PLM vendors, however, have developed targeted solutions that provide SMBs with far more options than they had as recently as two years ago.

With these innovations, SMBs are now able to take information authored within the engineering department, share it with both internal and external parties in a controlled environment and, as a result, improve their process efficiencies. Ultimately, improved process efficiencies will increase the overall competitive differentiation of SMBs and lead to a much brighter future for them as well as other US-based manufacturers.

Gar Smyth is the director of marketing for PTC. Send your thoughts about this commentary via e-mail by clicking here.