CoCreate pushes product generation beyond the traditional development team

HP Subsidiary Focuses on Solutions for Co-creation in Product Development.

FT. COLLINS, Colo., Nov. 12, 1996 -- CoCreate Software Inc. today announced its strategy for a co-creative product-generation environment, which will be the linchpin of the company's future direction. A step beyond the traditional methods of concurrent engineering, co-creation will allow various inside and/or outside experts and talents to join together in the generation of innovative products, irrespective of location or time.

As a rapidly increasing number of products become available to satisfy a given customer need, competitive pressures increase. Products and services need to offer superior customer value to compete. This cycle leads to products becoming more complex and requiring specialist expertise for their development. New ways of generating innovative products must emerge that incorporate this specialist expertise, but that do not sacrifice cost, quality and time-to-market. According to CoCreate Software Inc., product generation must become what the company calls a co-creative process, engaging people outside of the traditional design team, including customers, suppliers and/or partners.

In order to achieve a co-creative process, four basic elements are needed -- the ability to do the following:

• explore ideas;
• empower change;
• access know-how and information; and
• manage people and processes.

"Our goal is to create an environment that leverages talent and know-how across time and distance by letting engineers, suppliers and others easily and dynamically modify designs, share information and explore new ideas while managing all of these interactions," said Tilman F. Schad, president of CoCreate. "The fundamental capabilities for co-creation are an infrastructure that invites people with different knowledge and expertise to engage in the design of new, innovative products; design systems that allow productive contributions and exploration of new ideas; easy access to and integration of expert knowledge; management of process and data over the entire product life cycle; and the integration of best-in-class tools into this environment."

CoCreate believes it has a substantial lead in the creation of this new product-generation environment. It already has developed a number of its key components, including the following:

• technologies such as dynamic modeling for creating and modifying designs -- irrespective of the design history -- making modifying and contributing to product design substantially easier;
• dynamic conferencing for continuous communication -- allowing contributors to work simultaneously in the same virtual world;
• tools that allow team members to visually browse and simultaneously access all relevant product-model information, regardless of their location or stage of the product-development process;
• workflow and product-data-management solutions that work across the entire lifecycle of a product, to coordinate and manage the formal and informal phases in the co-creation process;
• prepackaged information and know-how, such as advisors, allowing all design members access to specialized knowledge and expertise; and
• open interfaces for integrating leading solutions from CoCreate's business partners.

"These key components, combined with our experience in the MCAD and PDM market, will allow CoCreate to provide the necessary tools for users to implement this new concept." said Schad. "The benefits being higher-quality products delivered to the market in a shorter period of time."

CoCreate Software Inc., a software subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard Company, develops tools for co-creation, including 2-D and 3-D mechanical computer-aided-design and product-data-management software. The solutions are known for high quality, ease of use, customization capability and support industry standards. They are installed on more than 90,000 systems in design, engineering and manufacturing organizations worldwide.

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