Solving Communication Breakdown in Your Business

Communication breakdown is the toughest challenge that plagues businesses and internal processes most often. We regularly hear the phrases “This is how we’ve always done it” or “It gets the job done,” but is settling for good enough where we want to hang our hats?

Although your current process might have helped define your success years ago, is it still relevant in today’s technology-empowered competitive landscape? While we see clients looking for the next best thing to bring their businesses to another level, what if we instead focused on an integral, often overlooked area of your company? How much time and effort could you save by taking a fresh look and implementing practices that improve communication between all the functional groups in your team?

Integrating Business Systems

A common place for breakdowns to occur is when having to hand off project data between teams who work in disconnected systems. Each point where a manual data handoff occurs is another point where errors can crop up and communication can break down. When data for a project lives in multiple, disconnected systems the data integrity starts to come into question. When engineering revised a production part, did we specify if we were scrapping or reworking existing parts? Did anyone send purchasing a new bill of material to upload into the ERP system? Do we have outdated images in marketing materials or assembly instructions? While a change might originally seem small in scope, it often snowballs into a big production that can have consequences if a communication breakdown occurs at any point in the process; even if getting clarification on something takes 5 minutes each time that quickly turns into hours wasted a day when working with more than a handful of team members.

Using systems that communicate with each other, whether natively or using connectors, can decrease the chance that a communication breakdown happens. Having as many of our business systems connected and controlled by built-in policies and workflows can ensure that all the relevant data flows to the functional groups that need it. If a change gets made to a production part it is tracked and documented in the system while the updated files get sent to the places they need to go.

Securing Version Control

Before clients commit to a formal version and revision control system, they’ll use something like Windows File Explorer or Google Drive to “control” their design data. We might see a project folder littered with files ending with “RevA_FINAL” or “FINAL_FINAL_OCT25” or one master file with each change detailed in its own PDF. While this works for smaller groups, as the team grows and data complexity grows, it becomes troublesome to handle the countless changes files go through over their lifecycle. Much like when working in disconnected systems mentioned above, when the data management solution is not native to the design tools you use, it introduces a lot of chances for communication breakdown. How can I ensure that someone who might not be as intimately aware of my naming scheme or someone looking for the latest version doesn’t accidentally grab a release that may be three months out of date?

3DEXPERIENCE controlled revision table

Dedicated data management systems, such as SOLIDWORKS PDM or 3DEXPERIENCE, can easily solve problems that arise with revision and version control. Systems like this “speak” CAD and can keep track of the complex references and metadata that make up your design data. Additionally, having dedicated workflows for your files can ensure that revisions are created when they are supposed to, permissions to see or edit files automatically change, and any derivative files like PDF or STEP can be created upon release of a file. Bringing control of your data into a native, purpose-built system reduces the number of errors that occur when hunting down the latest release of a file and can stop the communication breakdown from always having to double-check if you found the right file.

Leveraging a Drawingless Environment

An additional place for communication breakdown is when you spend time meticulously building complex parts and assemblies in 3D, detailing every aspect of the design only to simplify it to a couple of 2D drawing views. During that simplification to 2D, you often place the same dimensions and tolerancing information already on the 3D side but with the additional ambiguity that comes from not being able to rotate the model for more detail. To solve this, many clients implement Model-Based Definition (MBD) to improve communication with manufacturing teams and suppliers to fully realize a drawingless environment. MDB utilizes the 3D CAD model to store all relevant product manufacturing information and removes the need for drawings. Dimensions, tolerances, and notes are all visible on the 3D model and can be shared as a 3D PDF for review as well as a STEP file used in other downstream applications. The benefits speak for themselves but we often see a 50 percent improvement in communication with suppliers which leads to a 61 percent reduction in manufacturing mistakes.

SOLIDWORKS MBD in eDrawings

Introducing External Collaboration

A side benefit of integrating business systems, securing version control, and going drawingless means that it is significantly easier to bring external collaborators into your business processes. Previously, this was done using screenshots in an email or by sending a PDF to be redlined and then manually transferred into the engineering systems which ultimately leads to more chances of communication breakdowns. As we mentioned above, how can we ensure that the communication from external team members makes its way into our systems at the right time and place? Depending on the tools we use there are a couple of different ways that we can approach this.

SOLIDWORKS PDM has the Web2 client that allows access to the vaulted files from a web browser, requiring no local installation, and enables external users to interact with workflows, approving or rejecting changes. If that is more interaction than needed, SOLIDWORKS PDM also allows for the vaulting of emails to secure exchanges, attach them to engineering requests or files, and have that snapshot in history when the communication occurs. Further, SOLIDWORKS Manage has additional integration for Microsoft Outlook and can share direct links to external members to increase collaboration and reduce communication breakdown.

Share and Markup with SOLIDWORKS Cloud Services

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform also has native functionality to allow external members to interact with design data. This can start with the complimentary SOLIDWORKS Cloud Services where users can utilize the fundamental pillar, Share and Markup, to directly send data to external users for review without installing a viewer program. As the name implies, external collaborators can manipulate the models, take measurements, and apply markups in one, cloud-based environment. If collaboration needs to extend past redlining, external members can be invited to your 3DEXPERIENCE tenant and permissions can be set to give them authority to interact with engineering processes as if they were inside your building.

To discuss how to solve areas of communication breakdown in your business with one of our technical experts, contact us here.