Origin: The European e-HUBs consortium was awarded funding from the European Commission’s IST program in 2002 to develop a web hosted platform for the planning of e-Engineering projects. The focus is on partnerships that are remote, time-critical, volatile and limited to dedicated engineering services. The project aims at a set of web hosted services that enable such projects to be planned efficiently through a so-called e-Hub.

Objective: the new e-Hub should offer collaborative project planning (PP) services that focus on collaborative, tactical decision making that goes into the formation, work planning, contracting and trust building on both sides of an e-engineering partnership.

Approach: The focus is on projects that are performed in so-called small “project windows”, i.e. partnerships that are executed within a short time frame. Large product development companies recognize that global partnerships are critical to their future success. Rather than betting on the “extended enterprise” formula, companies express the desire to engage in on-the-fly partnerships. Ad-hoc partnering in project specific dynamic settings provides the agility that long term strategic alliance based partnering cannot guarantee. It is this realization that has companies looking for support to initiate and plan partnerships that are remote, time-critical and volatile. The launch of the R&D project in 2002 was predicated on the belief that these partnerships necessitate a new generation of collaborative project planning (PP) methodologies and services. Although there are elements in this approach that resemble “outsourcing” practices, the two types of business partnerships are in fact very different. First of all, e-Engineering is not driven by the need to “ship work” from one organization to the other. Rather, its main purpose is to bring in expertise which is needed for a new product development if that expertise is not part of the core domain of the developer organization. Another contrast is that there is no need to form strategic long term “service level agreements” as is current standard practice in outsourcing agreements. Rather, the contract is project specific, governed by the tactical needs of the project at hand. e-Engineering partners must be able to “fuse” their processes and they need to do so rapidly, remotely and securely, limiting project failure risks to the minimum. This obviously requires adequate tools that enable partners to reach agreements about project requirements, work arrangements, process mediation etc., swiftly and transparently.

Three main business drivers of the e-Hub have emerged from an analysis of the current landscape of collaborative engineering:

• Efficient integration of engineering services on an ad-hoc basis into engineering projects is of strategic importance for the productivity and competitiveness of engineering design consortia.

• Good project preparation and planning is a key element for the effectiveness of dispersed collaborative engineering teams thus adding to the business value and ROI on investments in current collaborative engineering platforms

• The delivery of generic project planning functionality paves the way for a whole range of other services that enhance the productivity and competitiveness of companies engaged in new product development.

It should be noted that e-Hubs are not targeted as catalysts of the over exposed Virtual Enterprise nirvana. In fact, e-Hubs offer a viable alternative with greater flexibility and short response time to changing circumstances.

Technology: collaborative PP is viewed by the e-Hub as a managed process that transparently generates a set of comprehensive planning documents. They may contain both structured models and unstructured documents. The added value of the e-Hub is that the generation process is collaborative in nature and logically ordered, driven by structured content exchange. Both aspects are embodied in a formal Project Planning Model (PPM) that companies develop and agree on at the strategic and international trade level. They represent the business intelligence of “how companies want to engage in remote partnerships”. The PPM is not one single model but a collection of models. Each of these models consists of a PP process model that incorporates the coordination logic of how the project planners negotiate and reach a resolution on one of the aspects that need to be tactically agreed. Each of the workflow models operates on one or more content templates. A content template is an ordered set of fields with specific meaning. The WF model controls who has read or write access to which field. All parts of the PPM are grouped in “packages”, each of which may contain a set of (sub) process models. Each process model is defined as a workflow model that adheres to the WfMC standard. In the project planning platform in the e-Hub the workflow models are enacted, initiated by the project planners. Depending on who is the owner of the workflow, different planners will have the right to launch the enactment of a workflow.

Results: The project will end in July 2004. An e-Hub prototype is currently being evaluated in workshops throughout Europe, whereas interviews are conducted with thought leaders and decision makers to elicit opinions on the viability of the developed e-Hub concept and prototype.

The Project Web Site can be visited here.