How Multi-Disciplinary Product Development is Transforming Innovation

The traditional consumer product development process often operates in silos, leading to inefficiencies, delays, and increased costs. However, consumer goods companies are now embracing multi-disciplinary product development to streamline collaboration across engineering, design, and manufacturing teams.

RTInsights recently sat down with Daren Beeson, Portfolio Development Executive at Siemens, to explore the challenges consumer product manufacturers face today and the technologies that are helping them enhance agility, reduce lead times, and improve product quality. The bottom line: By breaking down barriers between disciplines, companies can accelerate time-to-market and drive more customer-centric innovation.

Here is a lightly edited summary of our conversation.

RTInsights: What are the shortcomings of highly siloed traditional product development processes?

Beeson: Traditional siloed product development processes create significant inefficiencies in consumer products companies. When industrial designers, mechanical engineers, and manufacturing teams work in isolation with disconnected systems, the result is version control issues, communication delays, and costly design iterations that significantly delay market introduction and increase development costs.

RTInsights: Why is there growing interest in moving to multi-disciplinary product development that streamlines collaboration across engineering, design, and manufacturing teams?

Beeson: Market pressure to launch innovative products faster while maintaining quality drives the growing interest in multi-disciplinary product development. This is especially critical for products combining mechanical and electronic components, such as smart sports equipment or connected home appliances, where traditional siloed approaches can’t meet modern market demands.

RTInsights: What technologies are needed to support such a multi-disciplinary product development approach?

Beeson: Effective multi-disciplinary product development requires an integrated technology stack combining PLM, CAD, CAE, and manufacturing planning tools. The platform must enable real-time collaboration, a workflow that incorporates AI-enabled design, and a comprehensive digital twin, and it must offer advanced simulation tools while maintaining data integrity and security.

See also: How Smart Technologies Are Reshaping the Sporting Goods Industry

RTInsights: What tools does Siemens provide to adopt a multi-disciplinary approach?

Beeson: Our comprehensive solution suite enables multi-disciplinary product development through integrated tools: Teamcenter (PLM), NX (design and engineering), Simcenter (simulation/testing), and manufacturing planning. This portfolio allows simultaneous collaboration between industrial designers, engineers, and manufacturing teams, while Mendix and MindSphere provide additional capabilities for custom applications and IoT integration.

RTInsights: What benefits do your customers get from teaming with you? Do you have any success stories to share?

Beeson: Customers partnering with Siemens achieve significant benefits through their digital transformation journeys. Here are a few customer success examples:

• Electrolux uses Teamcenter and NX to standardize product development across multiple brands and locations.
• Black Diamond Equipment employs NX and Teamcenter to develop innovative climbing, skiing, and mountain sports equipment.
• Callaway Golf Company utilizes NX software for golf club design optimization and development.
• Radio Flyer implements Solid Edge and Teamcenter to manage its evolution from traditional to electronic ride-on products.
• Burton Snowboards leverages Siemens’ solutions to maintain leadership in snowboard innovation and manufacturing.