Speeding up development across all projects and products by reducing development time by a forecasted 25 percent

Overcoming complex product development challenges

In the competitive global electronics market, Furukawa Electric LATAM (Furukawa), a unit of the Furukawa Electric Group, understands the importance of focusing on identifying, selecting and developing innovative products and solutions to meet and exceed diverse customer expectations. The company knows business growth depends on it.

Manufacturing advanced solutions for network infrastructure and telecommunications, including complex product hierarchies with numerous variations and market subdivisions, Furukawa recognizes a critical need to streamline its product development program to accelerate innovation.

This requires digitally transforming how the company develops products to better meet customer needs with greater precision and cadence. Company leadership knows it requires significant changes throughout their product development processes.

To streamline product development, leadership knows they must first unify their documentation management system, eliminate overlapping systems and clarify project and product decision history, providing knowledge and visibility necessary to improve future decision-making to drive innovation.

“The biggest technical challenges were mainly related to documentation, to organize the documentation well and ensure accurate history so that, in the future, we can revisit it and understand past decisions,” says Xavier Chiron, global portfolio manager at Furukawa Electric LATAM.

The company also struggled with ensuring appropriate documents and information for future decision-making. Another challenge has been coordinating new product ideation, and because Furukawa did not have a structured environment for managing it, the process was too informal.

Other challenges revolved around documentation, avoiding unnecessary email flows or lost information. A modern centralized system was necessary to ensure the flow of information and processes was more robust.

Another challenge was the duration of projects tended to be too long; thus, improving the process with better cadence and agility was necessary. Fortunately, by teaming up with Siemens Digital Industries Software, Furukawa implemented Teamcenter® software, which is part of the Siemens Xcelerator business platform of software, hardware and services, to help overcome these challenges.

Undergoing a transformative change

When deciding on a product lifecycle management (PLM) platform, Furukawa used a robust selection process and eventually chose Teamcenter due to the market’s view of each competing platform, Siemens’ high-quality answers to their team’s technical questions and how Teamcenter met the company’s needs.

During this process, Siemens helped organize workshops to demonstrate the technology to Furukawa. Siemens also provided full support during all phases of choosing and integrating Teamcenter X, from picking system features to mapping technical requirements and implementation phases.

“We feel Siemens is a company that is very open to solving problems and to actually delivering solutions,” says Diogo Vilela de Sá, product owner at Furukawa Electric LATAM.

Another reason Furukawa chose to use Teamcenter X was due to the benefits of working on the cloud; however, they did not integrate it with the company’s systems. Furukawa preferred it to be a stand-alone module to ensure there is a good acculturation of the tool together with business areas. Additionally, the company uses it for product engineering, production engineering, development engineering, application engineering and quality management.

From the beginning, Furukawa chose a selected portfolio of products to benefit from Teamcenter X, which included the cable and connectivity advisor products to serve these three most important markets: the telecommunications market for carriers, cabling systems for enterprises and data centers, which represent 80 percent of Furukawa’s portfolio.

The first Teamcenter tool Furukawa implemented was the Initiative Lifecycle Management product ideation module, which transformed their product ideation process by providing a proven structure and methodology. Having better ideation management ensures the company has better products in its pipeline and in its portfolio, which is vital to its customers and the bottom line. Additionally, Furukawa uses the Teamcenter X document management capabilities while also scheduling management with the Product and Planning module and building reports with the report analysis tool.

“We begin the process within Teamcenter, collecting and selecting the most promising ideas and then turning them into projects,” says Vilela de Sá. “We also use Teamcenter X to manage these projects. Thus, Teamcenter is central to our decision-making process, from idea generation to product realization.”

PLM software selection process.

Improving efficiency, time-to-market and cost

For assessing which products are most desirable for Furukawa to develop, within Teamcenter, the team starts the product ideation process. Leveraging Teamcenter, they collect and capture ideas, select the most promising and then transform them into development projects.

Using Teamcenter and Initiative Lifecycle Management are at the center of helping to decide which products the company should include in its portfolio, from initial ideas to those that become products.

“We believe the best way to reduce time-to-market is to use Teamcenter X to improve the product idea selection process and monitor project evolution,” says Chiron. By implementing Teamcenter, Furukawa spends less time on nonessential projects. Thus, the return-on-investment (ROI) is greater, not only financially, but also to ensure the company is using resources more efficiently going forward.

Optimizing operations

Previously, achieving optimization was difficult; however, with Teamcenter, Furukawa can optimize resources and leverage management tools to achieve it.

Using Teamcenter simplifies the company’s product development methodology as well as operations. Before implementation, the product ideation model was informal, resulting in inefficient organization. Additionally, documenting this former process was precarious, making it difficult to achieve consistent results. Before integrating the Teamcenter ideation environment, it was virtually impossible to know how many viable ideas were in the pipeline. After integration, everything is clearer, and Furukawa can map every input for every idea.

Another key metric is that the team is now equipped to pursue reducing development time by 25 percent. So far, for the projects they collected within Teamcenter, the estimated completion time is already 25 percent lower than previous project times. This indicates they can reduce project time by at least 25 percent, allowing them to manufacture new products earlier and thus increasing profit margins.

Within the Siemens project management environment, the team can now easily extract quantitative information about the status of current projects. “A clear benefit of Siemens technology is the ability to analyze ideas with a scoring system and extract quantitative information about ongoing projects, which was previously difficult,” says Vilela de Sá.

Leveraging secure accessibility in the cloud

Thanks to Teamcenter X being accessible on the cloud, Furukawa’s product portfolio stakeholders, partners, developers and customers can access the same information anywhere, anytime, without depending on a virtual private network (VPN).

Another advantage of using a full software as a service (SaaS) system is global scalability, being able to think locally and act on a global level. Furukawa works with several development centers spread across the globe; thus, with Teamcenter, they can collaborate among stakeholders to develop new solutions.

Other benefits of leveraging Teamcenter are the ease of updating the system; the freedom to use subscription-based software and not have to purchase a license for an indefinite or lifetime period; a guarantee that the software will perform at high speed and not having to maintain infrastructure for a data center.

Continuing to build a productive relationship

Furukawa highly values the approach Siemens took to address and resolve any doubts, questions or difficult issues, which always accommodated their schedule and were handled successfully.

The biggest difficulty in implementing this massive project, which involved many people and teams, was aligning the agendas and commitments to ensure everyone was present when they needed to be.

In this ongoing relationship, the Siemens team remains flexible, willing to understand Furukawa’s challenges and to support its solutions.

After implementing the project, Furukawa and Siemens periodically meet to ensure the project continues meeting initial expectations as well as any new expectations that arise. Furukawa and Siemens maintain this constant and close personal contact about the company’s progress, how it is impacting and improving the daily lives of their team and the results they are producing.

“Our philosophy is to choose long-term partners who understand our business and can grow with the value we can produce with the partnership,” says Guilherme Hoffmann, digital transformation manager at Furukawa. “We also do a lot of benchmarking in the market, both technically and in terms of our partners’ delivery capabilities. Through this process, we decided that Siemens was a valuable partner with great potential to deliver what we needed. So far, this partnership has been very fruitful.”