Collaborative Engineering with cFolders

This Business Scenario Map emphasizes the benefits of cFolders, the new collaboration platform within SAP PLM Lifecycle Collaboration. It shows how your employees can efficiently share structured information with external partners or suppliers in a global network. The Map describes the benefits of the cFolders as an Internet-based collaboration solution provided by SAP PLM and it illustrates how this solution can help you work more effectively in various business scenarios and during the different stages of your collaboration projects. The target customers of cFolders are industries worldwide who exchange and communicate on complex products, assets, and project information within cross-enterprise processes, to share documents with internal and external business partners.

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Value Potentials	Business Benefits
Up to 30% reduced design cycle times ad up to 10% reduced redesign*	cFolders enable users to work in virtual teams to facilitate collaborative engineering
	Web-based access as well as subscribe and notification mechanisms speed up collaboration
Up to 50% reduced travelling expenses*	Increased efficiency of the development by involving additional people, e.g. customers and external partners, in the development process
	Reduced and shortened rework cycles through collaboration

Development Partner 1

Project Owner

Development Partner 2

Create new version of design

Assign design proposal

Release documents for further processing

Receive changes as subscriber and send notification

Initiate online conference and provide feedback

Subscribe to design proposal

Assign partners and share specifiations

Set up cFolders structure for new development

Receive notification and adopt changes to sub-assembly

Assign design proposal for sub-assembly

Source:
* Discussions with Customers

The value potentials shown in this table have been reported by selected SAP customers or independent third parties as referenced herein. However, there is no guarantee that such value potentials can be realized in any particular customer-specific business processes, and SAP does not make any representations and disclaims any liability as to the appropriateness of the referenced value potentials for any specific customer situation.
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Business Benefits	Value Potentials
Supports on-line collaboration (new versions are immediately visible) and realtime collaboration (conferencing tools are integrated)
Easy set-up and inheritance of authorizations, access control for complete folders or single documents supported	Up to 20% reduced administration costs*
Visualization and redlining tools are integrated	Up to 100% reduced costs for external tools*
Both collaborative and competitive scenarios are supported
External classification schemes (e.g. eClass) can be imported in data sheets to assign (light) structured data in an open XML based way, comparison capabilities support decision processes	Reduced procurement costs up to 7% if used in bidding scenarios*
Backend-integration into SAP PLM for user-management, documents and structures	Up to 80% reduced costs for integration*


Collaborative Engineering with cFolders In most cross-company business processes, you need to make sure that your external partners or suppliers always have access to up-to-date project information and are involved in a close communication process. SAP PLM cFolders facilitates collaboration for anyone who needs to structure documents and share them with other team members and business partners. cFolders supports two different business scenarios: a collaborative scenario (where team members and partners work together in one collaboration area) and a competitive scenario (for example, in a bidding scenario for publishing project specifications on the World Wide Web, as well as requesting and evaluating the bids received from various suppliers). The folder structure within a collaboration project can be hierarchically structured by subfolders that can contain different kind of objects: documents, discussions, data sheets, bookmarks, or texts. A sophisticated authorization concept on top guarantees that each collaboration partner can only edit those objects he or she is allowed to work with. Once a project is set up, the authorization mode will be initially set for each member of the collaboration project and will be passed on to all subordinate objects. This mode at the highest level of a collaboration project can later be overwritten for selected objects within the hierarchy. The version control mechanism within cFolders ensures that all collaboration partners can track the change history of a document. In addition to the version control mechanism, it is essential that all partners can be actively informed by means of notifications about relevant changes within objects. Alternatively, partners can subscribe a folder to stay informed of any possible changes. The alias concept integrated into cFolders allows the same object to possess different names. This can be useful when dealing with different companies where a specific object has more than one name. If it is necessary to share information synchronously, SAP has integrated WebEx into cFolders as part of SAP Product Lifecycle Management to help customers work on projects in real time over the Web. Users can access the "meeting" function from the cFolders interface and organize/track these meetings within their cFolders meeting inbox.