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ContentsCONCURRENT ENGINEERING THROUGH UNIVERSITY-COMPANY PARTNERSHIP
ABSTRACT
Firms operating in the frontier of technology with the production of short life cycle, as in telecommunications, require to develop and utilize new procedures in technology management allowing to stay abreast de competition. In this context the concurrent engineering has been applied as one the tools to increase the productivity, mainly in the research to design and to develop new products. On the one hand, research and academic institutions, ought to learn and practice, the development, among students and academics, the concept and techniques that bring about the concurrent engineering as a working tool. From this two distinct needs, it raised the partnership agreement between a business leading telecommunication's manufacturing company and the Federal Center for Technology Education of Parana to learn, to develop and to use jointly the output of concurrent engineering research work. Laboratories of the academic institution and the firm are used by the interdisciplinary staff of engineers, academics, and students. This work aim to explain the partnership process, the negotiations involved, mutual and individual benefits, the computational tools utilized, and operational difficulties faced in the first 18 months of joint work.
INTRODUCTION
In the global market scenario, the competition, the innovation, and the technology are inter-related, so that it is likely that the last one establish a link between the scientific development and the economic system as the predominant factors among the companies.
To stay in the competitive market, due to technology paradigm, it is important to consider a systematic cooperative work carried out between the university and the company as one strategic plan for long term achievement. This can lead to understand the government effort to improve the actual policy on science, technology, innovation, production and marketing.
Nowadays, in the age of extremely competitive world due to a volatile technology change, it is almost mandatory for the company to search the means and the strategies supported by the government policy, such as establishing a partnership agreement with universities and research centers. There is a government policy on which the tax exemption is granted for the companies working for R&D through university-company partnership agreement. It worthwhile to think about the way of competitiveness through the improvement of the capacity to understand technology innovation and its right application.
COMPETITION AND THE UNIVERSITY-COMPANY PARTNERSHIP
The dramatic change in the production process and work relation in the company, and the way to associate with the new technology, will necessarily account on the education of its manpower and the managers involved, and research on science and technology.
Due to such contingency, the technical education can be understood as that prepare the manpower for the new tools on new technology, undertakes an important role as it can collaborate to fulfill the company needs through the partnership for the joint research work of common interest.
The collaborative partnership for the joint work, as an strategic activity in the context of the technology paradigm, depends on effectively close link between the company and the university. This will improve the effort to change the behavior of academics and entrepreneurs aiming to get much of the benefits from the outcomes developed through common interest task work.
The academic institution, through the partnership with local company, will have a plenty of place to ransom the main feature related to technology and humanity which will present in the beginning, during, and after, by the actors involved on cooperative and innovative task work.
In this sense, the efficiency of its participation is to identify and learn about the benefits which will arise to the research and learning. Thus the search for the balance between the learning, research, and service activities will be of entire responsibility of the university. Analyzing closely to the universities and the companies objectives, one could see that each one has a distinct challenges, with different thinking of internal communities aiming to specific goals and expectations far from the nature of the activities exerted by each entity.
Thus, getting any kind of agreement can be seen as an awkward task for the joint work through university-company partnership. Nevertheless, considering the technology innovations matter of common interest, each one taking the advantage of the outcomes to adequate it to the social interest, this can lead to build the mechanism to allow each one to develop own activities keeping the main features.
With this argument herein, it needs to study carefully the business on university-company partnership, as a two way link activity. The time to consolidate is quite large compared to other business as it should pass several stages before the best and more efficient codes of communication between the partners are established.
To exploit the benefits of collaborative work through the partnership, the university should have, apart from the administrative structure, human resources, and the physical facilities, the policy and action enable to stimulate the change of behavior and the academic posture. This stimulus, means the utilization of tools for a creativity, making available an adequate learning and research techniques that enhance the academic and students behavior, sensitive to technology innovation, human relations, stimuli for enterprising, and the continuous cycle of "learn to learn". Such technique could represent the peculiar way of organizing the external condition of learning to tempt the change for a desired behavior of students. Thus, the role of the academic staff is essential to spread such technique acting as an agent to alter the present status and to push the administration to keep the pace to the new way of thinking towards innovated technology. The partnership between the university and the company emerges as a possible additional tool for the former to qualify and update de academic staff, but must take care to not consider as a solution for a long lasting blemish to be solved by this mean. The partnership itself requires the quality of academic staff, who is ultimately the process developer and the spark for the change of institutional policy.
ABOUT CONCURRENT ENGINEERING
Concurrent engineering is an advanced tool which can be applied to almost any product, project or service. In essence, it involves bringing together all required disciplines into one team, which, if properly controlled, and operating on a concurrent basis, will dramatically shorten the time required to bring the product to the market.
The marketing objective, traditionally reviewed by design department and all sectors of streamline until to become marketable product must be changed for a new strategic tool. In the case of concurrent engineering, all the relevant skills are involved from the first day. The team work comprises senior representatives from marketing, design, purchasing, production engineering, parts manufacture, field service, assembly and finance, working together to ensure that every aspect of the project is kept on target.
Suppliers, together with distributors, sales personal and senior management members are brought into the working group to ensure that everybody knows, what the optimum choices are at any stage.
It is the means to drive the theory into practice, so that once market and product have been decided, it remains for the team to execute the project. Regardless of product or service, it must question everything from concept to marketing; pursue modular design; a minimal number of components; minimal work content and simplicity in everything; frequently review the progress through meetings and discussion; and accept the team leaders authority and top management's final strategic decisions.
With the main parameters established, the team begins do work to more detailed project elements. Detailed time plan are formulated for individual elements of the project; suppliers and internal manufacturing engineers are involved in designing for the lowest cost, and the provision for production is made within existing or additional facilities. Following the prototyping and product evaluation and testing, final modifications are made before production ramp-up and market launch.
Feedback within the process ensure ease of communication throughout the workplace, and that suppliers' and customers' needs are evaluated at every opportunity[1]. That is briefly about the concurrent engineering which any new graduates from the university should know about.
BUILD UP OF PARTNERSHIP
The rise of the cost of the R&D and the short cycle of product's life, as the advantage of the cooperation in the technology, previous to be launched in the market, make the countries producing goods or services, to develop a competitive policy involving the risk covering, offer of subsidies, induced projects, and the support of restructuring the present status. Such policy can be supported by the government, as it is in Brazil, and private R&D, so as to increase the competitive power.
Competitive action and cooperation can not be treated as an isolated matter. It rather must be considered as an integrated action gathering available information's for the profit. In this context, because of the needs to articulate de partnership between the university and the company, with the possibility to utilize the tax exemption policy, the present program on concurrent engineering has emerged as an opportunity to develop the joint work of considerable step forward effect on existing practice of common interest relation between the academic entity and production firms.
This was a hard decision to take, as the academic staff nor the people in administration had enough experience to get into a complicated issue and to be responsible for a complex matter as to develop concurrent engineering research work within the university premises. In the other hand, the needs to give the engineering courses, presently offered, a new insight for the new era of production processes, strongly stressed on competition, it has decided to take an breakthrough action to start the partnership work. After several meetings for the consultation, discussion, and visits to the premises of the university and the company, the decision on the best way to carry out the program through partnership work has reached. The first step was to celebrate the agreement between the university and the company through comprehensive document to cover a broad areas of common interest, stating clearly the objectives, the scope of activities, and the responsibility of partnership.
The second step was to consider each new project work as an amendment to the existing agreement, stating clearly the responsible person, the objective and goal to the achieved. The special feature of the present partnership work, apart from the common use and learning about concurrent engineering, is the set up of laboratories for the university and for the company, linked by on line communication system to form an interdisciplinary team through the integration of academic staff, students, and engineers, working together in the same environment. The innovation proposal allows to any one of the team to work in any facilities, either at the company premises or at the university laboratories.
What can be considered at the university point of view is that, this will not solely develop the research work or sell the service. This will fundamentally provide the competency on concurrent engineering through effective practice dealing day after day on the project work and to serve as an radiator element of the process for other companies willing to work in the partnership joint work with university. The present agreement has started in mid 1.995. Three phases of development program have been established for that year. The phase I for purchasing hardware apparatus, basic software, set up the laboratory facilities with work bench, install the power line and the line for direct communication to the company. The phase II for a training on concurrent engineering principles to form a first group of academic staff and students. The phase III for the intensive training on sample simulations. The phase IV was developed throughout the year 1.996, training over a real problem involving the design of telecommunication's apparatus, but without any pressure on time constraint, in terms of deadline date to finish the simulation work. In this period, two groups of expertise was formed, one group of electronic, and another the group of mechanics. The phase V has started in the beginning of 1.997, undertaking the real work on concurrent engineering, the project being developed in time constraint basis.
DIFFICULTIES AND RELEVANT FACTORS
In the collaborative work such as university-company partnership, there is a strategy on which companies will exploit the combination of incremental technical improvements from several fields of technology to introduce new products and revolutionize the market. The partnership is effectively established through introduction of new technology, coming from specialized groups working in the academic affairs at the universities, whereas the company participates with the development environment.
To accomplish an acceptable results, there is a great cultural and objective barrier between the university and the company, so as to make very difficult to establish the partnership, mainly for the matter such as product development which requires the business secrecy. It takes time to get into mutual confidence stage, as an academic institution is open to the society, it is always prone to the suspicion on the way to avoid the leak of important matters to the competitor. Few project managers are open to allow the "outsiders" to work in the new project aiming to be a forerunner in the market. Anyway, it is not easy task to knock down the walls, which are used to form a cells of specialized expertise, working separately aiming to get a target. It is matter of company's policy and culture which are beyond the control of academics. For the technology improvement collaborative work aiming to achieve a fertile field of successful outcome is the risk business, thus it is inevitable that several difficulties could arise, out off the planned goal.
Some difficulties are predictable, but most of them are due to the nature of the mission statement of each entity, as will be stated bellow:
* The company aims de competition, so that to comply with an acceptable quality of products, attractive time span to launch the product in the market at a reasonable prices are the key factors;
* The other hand, the university has its own stand point, where the final objective is to improve the quality of learning tasks, which is linked to the development of academic staff, and the institution.
As can be noticed, for the company the time is a relevant factors, whereas for the university this issue is not necessarily relevant. Apart from this, there is also the limitation of spaces within the university premises for the specific project work and the problem of distance communication. Those factors are cumbersome for the company as in the several cases are limited to a fixed time scheduled to launch new product.
These are the main points to be considered, although more other factors contribute to interfere in the process such as the bureaucracy to retard a written or an electronic communications keep running smoothly, limitation of work load of academic staff for the program, the cost of administration, difficulties to spread and the proposal understandings within the company work force [2].
BENEFITS FROM THE PARTNERSHIP WORK
Analyzing the key factors over the multi-disciplinary team work environment, as occur in the concurrent engineering, it can be noticed that the outcome coming through the blend of individual talents of several expertise's is considerably advantageous compared to those achieved from a team work of limited specialization. The partnership work program involving the university and the company, rises the opportunity to the team to act at a reasonable level of informality, as the academic staff and students of several levels work together. The matrix structure is established to avoid possible conflicts from top to bottom authority stimulating the horizontal and diagonal communication with high level of integration among participants. The spirit of team work arises with low level of individual competition. The key point to consider in the partnership work is the opportunity to integrate the university, research center, and the company, establishing a channel to create a spin off system from the knowledge generating matrix to the end point of its application. Likewise, the advantage for the company is the opportunity to have always a fresh information needed to compete in the market through knowledge generating and testing entities, such as universities and research centers. The partnership can also bring another advantage for the company, as the academic staff and students working together on solving problems of real world of production system, it represents an early preparation of man power for the near future. It can be considered as part of the job training within the university premises. Furthermore, another advantage for the company is the possibility to get into updated technology still in testing conditions or ready to be used, mainly nested in the research centers which work quite often linked to the universities under partnership scheme.
CONCLUSION
The partnership for joint work through the agreement between the university and the company, it rewards both sides, integrating the knowledge generating entity to the final user.
In this way, the university can participate more closely to a social and economic reality with the accomplishment of the mission statement to promote the education with quality as required to change the state of welfare status. Through the cooperative activity, the academic staff also can be stimulated to practice the innovation, inducing to search the reference for innovation theory and technology management. Thus the joint work through the partnership can be considered as an important alternative to articulate the source of technology knowledge and the demand for new technology. In this interdisciplinary environment, the academic staff can improve either the content as the procedures. This creates the pattern and mechanisms for the cooperation which can be characterized and understood on the advantages, disadvantages, and limitations.
In view of present paradigm, it is expected the dramatic change in the academic institution, also in the companies with direct reflection for the technology development in this country.
The outcome benefit for the institution are valuable achievement, as many as 35 persons among academic staff and students are involved in the program. More than U.S.$ 2.0 million were spent to purchase microcomputers, workstations, basic and specialized software, to buy references, to set up an exclusive communication line between the university and company, to pay the scholarship and field trip expenses, and consulting fees. Almost U.S.$ 800,000.00 worth asset was accumulated in 18 month of project work which is a valuable achievement for the university to keep working in partnership research work [3].
REFERENCES
[1]. Scarlet, M. - Adapting to Survive-Manufacturing Engineer-vol 75 no 4 - Aug. 96 - p.186
[2]. Borsato, M. - Nucleo de Pesquisa em Engenharia Simultânea (NUPES) - Report to the MCT - Ministry of Science and Technology - Dec. 1996.
[3]. Borsato, M. - Private communication -The project manager for the Equitel-CEFET Partnership Agreement - Mar.1997.