Hewlett-Packard Co. announced Monday that it is forming a global alliance with IT consulting firm Deloitte Consulting to jointly develop and deliver collaborative solutions for the manufacturing sector.
The alliance is part of an existing partner-enablement program for HP’s manufacturing customers. The companies said the program aims to “drive faster connection, management and collaboration” within an e-business framework.
Bill Dupley, director of Mississauga, Ont.-based HP Consulting, said Canadian manufacturers are demanding applications that will take the time out of making a product. “We believe there is such a large demand for the collaborative solutions that we decided we needed to expand our delivery capability and…work directly with Deloitte.”
Specifically, the partners are aiming to support collaborative product development and lifecycle management via HP’s product lifecycle collaboration (PLC) framework, and is intended to help customers establish common product information processes within their supply chains, the companies said.
PLC, run on HP’s Netaction software suite, ties together the different companies or divisions that are required to design and market a new product within one integrated process, and enabled by one system technology, Dupley said.
Deloitte’s “diagnostic-driven” services will reduce the time needed to create the PLC framework, the companies said.
“The knowledge that goes behind this has been proven by (HP). It is a set of services that design the processes, disciplines and technologies that are necessary to implement collaborative engineering. It allows you to also bring in suppliers…(so) what you’re doing is tying all of these all of these different companies and own internal companies to work together on a seven-day, 24-hour clock to compress cycle time,” Dupley said.
“In a manufacturer’s, or any high-tech business, those who are there first get the most of the marketshare. The only way to get winning in those markets is to keep coming out with something better for less money first,” Dupley said.
“Canadian manufacturers have tremendous power to create wealth…our infrastructure as a country is a tremendous competitive advantage over developing worlds,” Dupley added. “We have a very strong Internet infrastructure…(and) we’re best suited to make use of this technology to increase our output as manufacturers.”
Deloitte Consulting in New York is at http://www.dc.com
HP Canada in Mississauga, Ont. is at http://www.hp.ca