Good in theory, not in practice - News

Electronic News, Oct 7, 2002 by Rob Spiegel

The case for using design collaboration tools may be compelling, but the electronics industry still is not embracing them.

Design engineering teams can collaborate online over far distances whether the design team members are within one company or spread among OEMs, contract manufacturers, distributors and suppliers.

There are huge savings to be taken in travel and time. Improved quality is also part of the promise. And collaboration allows the procurement team to peek at the product mid-design and add helpful comments such as, "Hey, folks, that part is no longer available, how about using this one."

The potential savings are significant when the supply chain team works happily with the design team. But that's just a vision right now, not reality.

For all its potential advantages, sophisticated design collaboration rarely occurs in the electronics industry. "There's been a lot of hype about design collaboration," said Laulie Balch, senior analyst for design and engineering at Gartner Dataquest. "The concept of having collaboration tools has taken off more quickly in some engineer areas than others."

Specifically, collaboration has taken root in industries such as automotive and aerospace, where much of the design work is mechanical. In electronics, collaboration technology is not yet mature. "It's still in the early St ages in electronics design," Balch said. "The tools are mostly young technology, and they have a long way to go before the kinks are worked out."

Some electronics companies have tried to convert mechanical design collaboration tools for use in electronic design, but the results have not been promising.

"There are tools flowing out of the mechanical space and into the electronics space," said Glenn Bassett, VP and general manager of Promiere Services Group, a services unit of Phoenix-based Avnet Inc. "But mechanical design is pretty straight stuff. Electronic components need a logic device with certain characteristics, and that can include a whole lot of devices."

Dave DeMaria, executive VP and general manager, Systems Solutions Business at Cadence Design Systems Inc., also laments the lack of sophisticated tools for electronics design.

"Design collaboration in electronics is very immature. A lot of it today is visionware and theoretical," DeMaria said. He noted that the downturn has stunted the development of electronics design collaboration tools. "Because of the overall economy, there hasn't been much corporate adoption, especially since these tools cost a lot money." San Jose-based Cadence will roll out its own design collaboration tools in the coming months.

These barriers do not stop collaboration from occurring. Design teams need to work together, and they're geographically scattered in the best of circumstances. An Intel executive recently said that Intel can no longer design chips at one site. The collaboration that most frequently occurs is by phone and e-mail.

"It's still ad hoc," Balch said. "It's accomplished by e-mail back and forth, meetings and faxes. Not much is through collaboration tools."

Procurement tends to be out of the design loop altogether, which means the sourcing crew doesn't get to find out that an obsolete component has been designed into the system until the designers are finished and toss the design over the wall to procurement. For much of the industry, the separation between engineering and procurement is a church and state division.

"Engineers are not paid to care about supply chain criteria," said Promiere's Bassett. "Their primary criterion is the performance of the board." He explained it doesn't make sense to force procurement priorities onto engineers. "If you incorporate supply chain information into the design process, you're asking them to wrap their mind around something that won't fit," he said.

To help overcome this information gap, Promiere provides designers with the component database created by SpinCircuit Inc., a San Jose company partly owned by Avnet. "Using SpinCircuit helps engineers cut down on going to different Web sites," Bassett said. The database offers the additional service of helping a company prioritize component selection by availability, life-cycle stage and price. Thus, when an engineer finds a selection of potential parts, they come up in the order of preference set by the sourcing and procurement team. Otherwise, the database was built to be engineer-friendly. "The tool is designed to help unobtrusively," Bassett said.

The savings from procurement-ready designs can be significant. "This can cut down on procurement receiving nightmares," Bassett said. "If you drive purchasing savings by 10 [percent] to 15 percent, you've saved a bunch of money."

Cadence is also an investor in SpinCircuit and uses the database to help connect design to procurement. "Seventy percent of the component decisions are made by the design team. They care about costs, but their main concern is, 'Can I get what I want,'" DeMaria said. "Procurement needs to be involved early on so we populate procurement information such as cost, manufacturer and tolerance into the database."