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New Product Development - Delphi manages NPD using Enable

Delphi is a world leader in mobile electronics, transportation components and systems technology. Multi-national Delphi conducts its business operations through various subsidiaries and has headquarters in Troy, Michigan.

Delphi has approximately 190,000 employees and operates 171 wholly owned manufacturing sites, 42 joint ventures, 53 customer centres and sales offices and 34 technical centres in 41 countries.

The company's Aftermarket division in North America, Delphi Product & Service Solutions, was an existing client utilising Enable's content and document management systems to run their company wide intranet and global websites.

They had a requirement for a system to manage their Enterprise Change Management process covering both the development of new products and modifications to existing products.

With product engineering, marketing and sales personnel located throughout North America the management of product introductions and modifications was problematic for several reasons:

1. Lack of visibility - users could not see an up to date status, or when a new product was entered onto their main system. Information required for the process was dispersed across physical locations and media
2. Unstructured - as there were no enforced rules about how the change request form moved through the process, there was increased scope for errors and inconsistency.
3. Unable to track - it was very difficult and time consuming to track where the change request form actually was in the process. There was also scope for data to get lost.

This combined with a corporate requirement to implement CMII configuration management methodologies throughout the organisation led to the requirement for a web-based process management solution.

The key objectives were as follows:

1. Provide the capability to configure the software to the exact processes used within the organisation.
2. Allow any employee to initiate a request for new product introductions / modifications.
3. Provide templates for all mandatory forms.
4. Act as a central repository for all the documents and forms required to support the request.
5. Provide a secure, web-based environment for project teams to access documents and files.
6. Graphically represent the process phases and the position of each request within the process.
7. Provide high level reporting of progress for senior management

Enable was selected because of:

1. Their experience of implementing document management and workflow solutions.
2. Their ability to integrate the process management solution into Delphi's existing intranet site and maintain a single employee portal.
3. Their expertise in providing additional support through staff with personal experience of both workflow software and new product development in an engineering environment.

Enable met with the Delphi team to map their existing paper based process and to outline their requirements for the European Change Management system.

The requirements were then formulated into a proposal and project plan. A phased approach was adopted allowing a small initial group to populate the system and review the functionality.

Following this initial user feedback the solution was configured. As the solution is entirely web-based there was no client-side software to install and upgrades to the software could be implemented without effecting availability of the system.

The key features of the solution provided:

1. A graphical user interface to clearly illustrate:
   a) Process phases from start to finish
   b) The position of each project within the process
   c) An overview of each project as well as the documents, tasks and forms associated with it.
2. A process design tool to define:
   a) The process phases
   b) The forms, documents and tasks required for each phase
   c) The business rules for the sign off of each phase.
3. The ability to upload forms and assign the phases to which they will act as cover sheets / templates.
4. Upload documents (files) and assign the phases to which they are required for progression of the project (with optional version control).
5. Team roles - assign users as team members for individual projects and specify their roles within each phase of the project.
6. Create tasks required for completion of a phase and assign them to team roles
7. Reporting to:
   a) Provide an audit trail throughout the process
   b) show the speed of response to requests
   c) identify bottlenecks preventing introduction of new products.

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