R&D PARTNER OUTSOURCING HUB
SOFTWARE AND PROCESSES FOR
ENGAING AND MANAGING TEAM MEMBERS

What is your challenge as you see it?

“As the Director of R&D, my challenge is to limit the information flow to just the essential, practical set of metrics – that are absolutely critical to improving our productivity and enhancing our quality of development. But we run into difficulties in collecting that vital information. We do not have a process – leave alone an automated process – for the discipline and rigor of collecting metrics from our development centers. People have to take time away to provide raw data for metrics. After that, we have issues of metrics data integrity and reliability, we have ”

What solutions do you have today?

”Today, I have a couple of IT people in my staff to help me with integrating data on a monthly basis. Their job is to pull in information from our vendor management system, our purchase order requisitioning system, and compare that with the execution data collected from R&D project managers. For every outsourcing partner, we compile an “Outsourcing Performance Scorecard” that we discuss and call the outsourcing liaison manager, in case we run into any issues, with respect to compliance. On a normal basis, we meet every week, and decide what to do.”

What exactly do you need and why is it different?

You need an information hub– that sits in the middle of a two-way traffic between your R&D organization, and outsourcing partner. You need to make sure all activities such as new projects, engineering changes as well as issues and hurdles – all flow through that interface bus. You need the “hub” or common interface to extract information about spend, execution, and changes in commitment and compliance reports are derived from it. You need the partner interface to feed and send information and alerts to all relevant parties, for decision support in a timely manner.

What does R&D Partner Outsourcing Hub do? (What are its features?)

R&D Partner Outsourcing Hub is a common conduit of information flow between R&D project managers and outsourcing partners. Right from the opportunity stage, all information regarding work and spending estimates, and time schedules flow through the Hub. In addition, while projects are in progress, the status and work completion, issues, hurdles and dependencies are collected and converged in the R&D Partner Outsourcing Hub. R&D Partner Outsourcing Hub then filters every piece of information against “rules” – or delivery guidelines, compliance requirements and provides alerts and warnings both ways. R&D Project managers are informed in time of the changes, and they can make decisions to adjust workload, reprioritize and reschedule in a timely manner.

Part of the Bigger Picture…

R&D Partner Outsourcing Hub is part of the overarching GRIP management framework.