Product Development Gets Lean With Perot's 'eOps Center'Product Development Gets Lean With Perot's 'eOps Center'

Aiming to help manufacturers bring better products to market faster and more cheaply, Perot Systems has launched a new engineering operations center to bring the principles of lean product development to engineers in a range of manufacturing businesses.

Known as the eOps Center, the new facility will help manage product-development teams worldwide, 24/7 using Web-based collaboration tools, manufacturing software, videoconferencing, and high-speed networking. Engineers collaborating remotely anywhere in the world will be able to monitor workflows and complete tasks from any device, including desktop and laptop computers and even browser-equipped smartphones.

Located in Peoria, Ill., the eOps center was developed by Perot Systems' eServ unit, which Perot acquired in February 2006. EServ was founded in 1999 to provide engineering consulting, product design, and support to large companies, as well as technology integration services.

The eOps concept, according to eServ president James Richmond, grew out of two related developments: the explosion in outsourced engineering services and the movement from "lean production" -- a buzzword and a goal for manufacturers for more than a decade -- toward equally slimmed-down product development cycles.

"It's almost impossible to control these big product-development projects at an engineering level," said Richmond, "when you've got engineers surfing all this data and trying to make sure that everyone is working on the same data set to create a product."

EServ has developed what is essentially a network operations center for engineering projects, from which all the data for a specific task is pushed to a specific engineer, who completes the work and sends it back. EOps specialists track all changes and manage the workflow, ensuring the integrity of the data and providing real-time feedback on schedules, budgets, engineers' performance, and so on.

The Peoria facility has nine 64-bit machines running Windows, with quad-core processors and four video cards in each machine for more powerful graphic displays. Equipped with Tandberg video-conferencing gear, each workstation costs about $15,000. The center also uses Oracle database software that allows eServ to search on individual projects to see which engineers worked on specific components and which eServ employees have the specific skill sets required for new products.

The collaboration tools in use include products from Dassault Systemes, Siemens' UGS unit, and Parametric Technology.

EServ is also working with Microsoft to create a desktop environment for engineers customized for the projects they're working on, so that all the appropriate applications and data sets are launched automatically, eliminating the time spent in lengthy searches. Such inefficiencies can be hugely costly, Richmond points out, citing studies that show as much as half of engineers' time on product-development teams is wasted and only one-quarter is spent actually developing the products.

For an individual manufacturing company to reproduce the eOps center would cost in the dozens of millions, adds Richmond, and "what would be harder would be to come up with the culture to implement it."

Growing out of the lean manufacturing movement pioneered by Toyota in the 1980s, lean production development seeks to bring the same just-in-time schedules and waste-reduction tools to the creation of new products. IBM researchers have estimated that six months of lost time to market can reduce a product's total lifetime profitability by one-third. Using lean product development principles and the eOps technology can significantly reduce time to market, Richmond claims.

While the eOps Center officially opened last week, Richmond said that prospective customers have been viewing the facility since August. He expects to announce the first eOps customer in the first quarter of 2008.