Team Collaboration in Virtual Workspaces

Virtual teams are essential in order to compete in today’s environment of outsourced product design and manufacturing, compressed product lifecycles, and custom product configurations. These teams require a robust set of collaborative services to increase the innovation, speed, and effectiveness of product development processes.

ENOVIA's solutions enable users to create a workspace: collaborative digital workplace of global team members. Geographically distributed team members who offer expertise from various disciplines such as design, engineering, manufacturing, procurement and finance can use a workspace. Within this secure workspace, members can organize, view, review, mark-up and approve documents and other product data. Workspace leads can set access controls for each member to limit visibility and edits for different data that is managed.

The data managed within ENOVIA goes through a lifecycle that captures the steps (or states) of its creation, review, release and/or obsolescence. A single object type can have multiple lifecycles depending on the business need. In order to go from one state of a lifecycle to another, electronic signature approvals are needed often. Signatures can be either static or dynamic through use of a route, which define the additional steps of approval that must occur.

ENOVIA users can schedule online meetings to track decisions that are made during the product development cycle. Capabilities exist to plan, announce, manage and track the results of all meetings. Meeting participants and non-participants are able to access up-to-date meeting information, actions and deliverables at any time.

ENOVIA enables the identification of product issues in order to facilitate change and formally raise and track product gaps and concerns. Users can raise an issue for analysis and resolution. Issues are classified in order for an “issue manager” to be assigned to manage its lifecycle and determine its validity and resolution. The issue is then typically resolved using more formal change processes for other ENOVIA products (see Change Management solution).

Users stay up-to-date with the latest information by monitoring discussion threads of interest. Users have the ability to subscribe to individual threaded discussions along with monitoring actively discussed topics throughout the system. Contributing to a discussion is easy through responding to an email message received as a subscription. Additionally, users can subscribe to get notified when data of interest is modified, approved or deleted.