Employee Collaboration

A means for designers and engineers to share project data and designs over secure Internet and extranet links.

By nature, design is a collaborative process. A design originates at one desk and then moves throughout the business, gathering detail and undergoing revisions. For many companies, the collaboration reaches outside the four walls of its own offices to involve remote workers and third parties, who add value and then return the designs to the source. Transforming all this back-and-forth transfer from a manual to an electronic process provides numerous benefits:

• Speeds time to market for new ideas and products by moving designs more quickly from person to person, and by reducing delays between steps in the process

• Enables members of a design team to review design changes in real time by sharing the file, further compressing development cycle times

• Lowers costs by quickly moving designs between groups and desktops without need for express shipping

• Enhances decision making by enabling managers to review designs in-progress, on line

• Enables companies to conduct proof-of-concept testing in a virtual environment, with greater flexibility to test multiple scenarios and dramatically lower costs

• Reduces paperwork

• Improves quality by enabling better version control and minimizing errors

But collaborative design over a network can create significant challenges. Graphic-intensive design files can quickly overwhelm a network, slowing performance and robbing productivity from other employees. When the files need to travel outside the business to other companies, not only performance but security becomes an issue.

Implementing Collaborative Design

To support collaborative design, businesses should be prepared to deliver:

• High-speed connectivity --To maximize designers' productivity, start by ensuring fast access to the enormous files that applications such as computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided engineering (CAE), and photo editing tend to produce.

• Security --To protect network-based design documents from prying eyes, implement end-to-end security, not only for files traveling on the internal network but also for files exchanges over the Internet or an extranet.

• Internet connectivity --The Internet provides a cost-effective forum for sharing designs between a company's own groups and with external designers. And by constructing a virtual private network (VPN), a company can provide fast, secure access to documents stored on its internal systems, without the high cost of dedicated network connections.