How does PLM technology support knowledge transfer and translation in new product development? Transparency and boundary spanners in an international context

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2012.07.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Information Technology is often viewed as imposing too much standardization and limiting flexibility in New Product Development (NPD). This paper aims at understanding how the use of Product Lifecycle Management Technology (PLM) contributes to knowledge sharing in an international NPD environment. The research is based on a longitudinal case study of a consumer goods industry group and involved development teams in Europe and local suppliers in China. Knowledge transfer and translation were observed through the reduction of communication glitches among members and increased NPD work with Chinese suppliers. The results of the case study indicate that (1), with an important codification effort, the use of PLM technology resulted in higher data and network transparency and enhanced knowledge transfer; (2) PLM served as a particularly useful tool for knowledge translation especially for boundary spanners in their work relationships. While PLM can be considered the main mechanism for knowledge transfer in this context, the case suggests that knowledge translation requires a boundary spanner intervention and that, with the use of PLM, they reinforce each other. Particularly noteworthy was a positive shift in the boundary spanners' roles from the project leader to the outsourcing engineer. In turn, this unintended consequence reinforced their credibility and the legitimacy of the use of the system with the Chinese suppliers.

Highlights

► This paper helps understanding PLM use and its effects on knowledge sharing. ► The phenomenon is described in an international and inter-organizational context. ► PLM use reinforces the role of the outsourcing engineer who acts as a boundary spanner. ► The paper views knowledge transfer and translation through the lens of ‘glitches’. ► With the boundary spanner, PLM features improve knowledge translation.

Introduction

New Product Development (NPD) is increasingly taking place across organizations and geographical borders. The literature dealing with management of knowledge boundaries in inter-organizational development of Information Technologies illustrates the complexity of the phenomenon and is only beginning to address it (Levina & Vaast, 2008). Surprisingly little research has been conducted on examining the effects of IT in international NPD projects on knowledge sharing. When NPD takes place in an international context, knowledge must be exchanged across organizational, geographical, cultural, and language barriers. These multiple barriers to knowledge sharing create high potential for failure (Bjorn & Ngwenyama, 2009) and a consequent degree of risk requiring boundary spanners. More recently, this complex situation has also stimulated a demand for digital solutions, such as Organizational Memory Systems, Cooperative Work Systems, and Project and Resource Management Systems (Pavlou & El Sawy, 2006).

The market has responded to the need for integrating these systems with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technology, which manage product and project information using object storage and workflows. Such tools support the definition and standardization of workflows and information objects, as they are produced and used by multiple participants in various functions, thus supporting the development phase from design to industrialization (manufacturing testing and validation) (Batenburg, Helms, & Versendaal, 2004). PLM technology historically comes from Product Data Management (PDM) systems which are dedicated to the management of links between product components and more generally engineering activity (Grieves, 2006, Stark, 2004). It is noteworthy that PLM mainly supports development tasks, and has little to do with creative and ill-defined research activities.

Given this technological evolution, this paper contributes to the growing literature in IS and NPD by investigating the effects of PLM on knowledge sharing effectiveness in an inter-organizational and international context. In fact, while PLM enables users to store and modify objects such as product representations, and supports development planning and scheduling, the flexibility ascribed to such integrated technology may not be as high (Barrett & Oborn, 2010) as the literature suggests (Ewenstein and Whyte, 2009, Star and Griesemer, 1989), and thus hamper learning (Henderson & Clark, 1990) and mutual understanding (Te'eni, 2001). It is of particular interest to us to examine whether and how PLM can be used, and how well knowledge is shared in a context where it crosses many types of boundaries (Romano, Pick, & Roztocki, 2010).

In the New Product Development literature, two opposing streams of literature address the debate on flexibility versus standardization. One school attempts to identify best practices and processes that would enable firms to increase their control over NPD and thereby reduce the variance in results. Typically, Cooper's (2008) stage gate model is the exemplar for this school of thought. This model consists in defining key project milestones and predefined deliverables on each milestone so that transparency, i.e. the ability to let everyone see and understand the input and progress made in NPD (Moenaert, Caeldries, Lievens, & Wauters, 2000), is increased. A second school of thought questions the ability to control a complex, multi-faceted, context-dependent process like NPD. Thus, Sethi and Iqbal (2008) show that rigorous adherence to stage-gate activities and criteria are correlated with learning failures, which in turn lead to new product failures. This school calls for flexibility of process and criteria (Krishnan and Ranganathan, 2009, Miner et al., 2001, June, Sanchez and Mahoney, 1996, Sethi and Iqbal, 2008). We are questioning the contribution of a standardizing information technology (PLM) to support knowledge sharing effectiveness and flexibility in NPD. The IS literature emphasizes that IT use effects are generally complex and related to structural changes in organizational and work practices (Baxter, 2008, Robey and Boudreau, 1999). This case study sheds light on how PLM facilitates knowledge transfer and translation practices and their effectiveness; in particular it offers insights on how boundary spanners' knowledge translation role benefits from PLM. Thus, this paper addresses three research questions. In an international and inter-organizational NPD context:

  • Q1:

    To what extent do standardizing IT platforms such as PLM support knowledge transfer and also knowledge translation effectiveness?

  • Q2:

    How does PLM use affect knowledge transfer practices and especially those related to transparency?

  • Q3:

    How does PLM use affect knowledge translation practices and especially the translation role of boundary spanners?

This research benefits from the unusual access we had to an industrial group to study 1) the effects of PLM use, for which case studies are lacking, 2) the context of growing European-Chinese supplier relationships which remains under-investigated, and 3) the consumable goods industry which may offer different insights with less radical product innovations than do Gehry's buildings (Boland et al., 2007, Gal et al., 2008) or the Stealth Bomber (Argyres, 1999) cases.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next section reviews the literature for understanding how PLM use affects knowledge sharing effectiveness in NPD. In Section 3, we present the organizational context of the case study and our methodology based on participant observations and interviews before and after PLM implementation. In Section 4, we report our empirical results. Finally, the Discussion generalizes results of this case and proposes directions for future research.

Section snippets

Theoretical background

In order to identify research gaps and corresponding research questions, we first question the contribution of IT for knowledge transfer and translation. We then introduce the glitch concept (Hoopes & Postrel, 1999) to measure knowledge sharing effectiveness, before tackling transfer and translation practices in an international NPD context. We end with the literature on PLM technology. Given the scarcity of PLM papers in IS we introduce its main characteristics and compare its features with

Study design and focus of analysis

The case study method is an appropriate research strategy for gaining rich empirical insights (Yin & Campbell, 2002) and for understanding PLM's contribution to NPD knowledge sharing effectiveness using a wide variety of data sources. The current case study focuses on showing the changes between effects observed before (which is our baseline case) and after PLM implementation. This was made possible under a CIFRE contract (Klein & Rowe, 2008), which allowed the first author of this paper to be

Results

This section systematically reports the evolution of knowledge transfer and translation by considering first the situation prior to PLM implementation and then after. We present the evolution of knowledge sharing practices and then knowledge sharing effectiveness for these two knowledge sharing issues.

Discussion

This case study allows us to understand to what extent a standardizing IT platform such as PLM supports knowledge sharing effectively in an NPD process which also requires some flexibility, thus answering the first research question. The study also identifies work practices, thus offering explanations for the reduction of glitches and improvements in knowledge transfer and translation effectiveness. In particular it provides 1) a better understanding of how transparency practices can be more

Conclusion

This study has examined how Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technology contributes to NPD knowledge transfer and translation in an international context. While previous researchers have found that PLM and similar technologies can have significant positive impacts on NPD (Andersson et al., 2008, Banker et al., 2006, Pavlou and El Sawy, 2006), most studies have examined the process when the level of uncertainty is high due to radical innovations (Argyres, 1999, Baxter, 2008, Boland et al., 2007

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Stephanie Watts for her invaluable help, and we would like to thank Michael David, Omar El Sawy, Jonny Holmstrom, JoAnne Lim, Kalle Lyytinen, James Pick, Hiro Takeda and Dov Te'eni for their remarks and comments. We are also thankful to Dan Robey and four anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments. Normal caveats apply.

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