how Jumper 2.0 helped an old company find new life.

A division of an automotive company whose development process was global and fast-paced wanted to push project knowledge and data upstream.

The automotive product development process had become more complex - the need to collaborate tightly across a variety of design disciplines, globally distributed design teams, and geographically dispersed engineering and manufacturing operations is crucial for implementing a successful distributed initiative. While the benefits of a more distributed development process are varied, today’s highly competitive global economy makes a distributed approach to new product development a necessity rather than a just an option.

The development and production departments needed to cooperate together to accomplish the substantial work of developing a new engine, which requires the creation of hundreds of new parts, including the cylinder block and cylinder head, which serve as the framework of the engine.

At the subsystem level, engineers created multiple alternative solutions for each component, instead of designing one component variation to match a master solution. Over time, each alternative is evaluated against performance tradeoffs. Weak ones are eliminated and new ones are created, often from combining components in new ways. How could they get this knowledge and data out of the subsystem projects and effectively shared between teams?

This was a big driver for them. They wanted to push this data upstream and out of each isolated project. To do this presented numerous challenges. Most of the data was highly fragmented and really could not effectively be integrated. And most of the supporting documentation was distributed in different content systems. The company had literally thousands of these distributed storage systems with no global visibility of what was there.

A few months ago they stumbled on Jumper. The software presented a solution that used Web 2.0 tools on the front-end to allow project teams to link key technical data with each associated design variation, and with all supporting documentation that would provide the necessary context for other teams. The knowledge capture features allowed them to literally make all of the set solutions that were not used on one vehicle available for potential reuse on another vehicle.

unleash the flow of knowledge

The product development process is quite a bit different from a manufacturing process. The core "material" is not physical objects, but knowledge and information. The opportunities for waste however, are quite similar to those found in manufacturing operations. Waste is just as possible with intangible things, such as ideas and knowledge, as it is with tangible things, such as physical materials. And they are both manageable, largely by new ways of thinking about traditional knowledge management.

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