The Global Product Design Benchmark Report: Managing ...

The Global Product Design
Benchmark Report

Managing Complexity as Product Design Goes Global







December 2005



The Global Product Design Benchmark Report

Executive Summary

he challenge of keeping an engineering team working efficiently without getting
in each other’s way can be difficult to manage. As products become more com-T plex and design data more expansive, the problem of keeping everything in con-
trol grows harder. Product development projects now involve people from multiple de-
partments trying to collapse product introduction lead times. As if this was not complex
enough, many companies are distributing these resources around the globe and forming
virtual teams of people from different companies. If managing the product development
process was a challenge before, it is not going to get any easier as companies continue to
adopt global design strategies. Global design has cost benefits that are very attractive to
today’s manufacturer, but adds new communication, control, and collaboration chal-
lenges and intensifies existing problem areas such as protecting intellectual property.
Issue at Hand
Forty-four percent of respondents to Aberdeen’s Product Innovation Agenda benchmark
study indicate that they are assembling teams across geographies to pursue global design
(Figure 1). For discrete manufacturers the percentage raises to 53%. Respondents to Ab-
erdeen’s Enabling Product Innovation report ...