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Challenge: Dispersed teams The modern Micro and Nano Technology (MNT) development cycle often involves diverse teams of engineers spread across the globe and working within many different companies. Working together means there is a need for communication to share plans and experimental results. While email is still the main way to achieve this communication, it has proven to be inadequate in many cases. It is too cluttered and represents informal knowledge which is unstructured and difficult to retrieve. Normally the knowledge gained becomes inaccessible as soon as the project has ended and a new email folder is created. There are also cultural aspects to consider, both between companies and countries. Many different ways of documenting and storing development data are used and there are also differences in the ways of communicating. The recent trend for outsourcing can make this process even more difficult. The main challenges in product engineering for Micro and Nano devices emerge from the structure of the industry. The relatively young age of the MNT-sector can be the reason for its unique structure, which differs from more traditional industries. Besides the relatively few “traditional” big micro- and nano electronics enterprises, the MNT-sector consists of an increasing number of Small- and Medium-scale Enterprises (SME). The many SMEs cannot and do not offer the complete development of an MNT-product like the big companies. Rather, they offer products, services and knowledge for a specific area, such as special fabrication techniques or design services. Often the development of a product is undertaken by different companies with different areas of expertise in the supply-chain. This collaboration is littered with pitfalls due to the distribution of tasks, data, information and knowledge. In such a development scenario, communication becomes a key to success. Solution: For this reason, it is essential for a smooth development that each team adheres to the same processes when it comes to centralising development data results and gaining information and knowledge. In many cases this is something that currently does not happen because tools to enable this often address just one area of the development cycle. A classic best-of-breed approach for selecting development support tools is difficult to achieve because the integration of the tools, especially in this multi-partner scenario, can be rather challenging. The XperiDesk platform provides every development team and its members with a better chance to unify the communication, optimise the R&D workflow and allows to develop manufacturing processes to achieve profitability faster and at lower cost. A more detailed description of this topic is given in the SmallTimes article: Smooth process development using dispersed teams |
