Best Practices in Sustainable Supply Chain Management

2.5. Recommendation: Coordinated, cross-functional team

Cross-functional collaboration among departments is a success factor for sustainability in NPD. In today's business environment, cross-functional development may include internal organizational integration as well as inter-firm (external) collaboration. Top management must support cross–functional work – where people from different areas work jointly toward a new product.

Cross-functional teams reflect the core values of sustainable new product development. The development team needs to know their roles and functions in detail, so collaboration can occur and include experts with sustainability capabilities Global design activities require global-acting experts who are responsible for several projects which provides the advantage in standardization and expert-resource utilization. Knowledge management activities support team training and learning for NPD personnel and may facilitate knowledge creation and sharing.

Engineering collaboration across companies is essential to develop innovative and sustainable products. Collaboration is critical for product improvement, cycle time, and cost reduction. Other benefits to cross-functional integration in NPD include linking functional viewpoints, information exchange beyond functional boundaries; efficient resource allocation and pooling of capabilities, providing access to new skills or technologies, and sharing of R&D costs and risks leading to enhanced NPD. Successful collaboration is dependent on technology and organized processes. The first step towards collaboration is for a company to remove functional silos and adopt a product/process approach. Specific to sustainability, a resource-based view that reviews the inter-firm resources that are valuable for increased competitiveness is needed. Factors that assist in collaboration include: sharing information which focuses the organization on common goals, sharing resources, communication, creating knowledge, using common procedures, trusting, and jointly make decisions.

A collaborative environment, tools, interoperability standards, and architectures must be coordinated so that barriers do not prevent collaboration. Barriers to collaborations include poor communication and a lack of process harmonization that induce silo thinking. Global teams in NPD require suitable applications supporting communication and collaboration to enable teams to work at different locations. Barriers include: organizational costs, time and efforts for team meetings, coordinating the workflow of team members from various functional units, solving inter-functional conflicts and the potential information overload of NPD members' processing capabilities, opportunistic behavior by one, knowledge spillover, distrust, costs of monitoring inter-firm partners, and communication problems due to different organizational cultures.

NPD Success Factors supported by PLM includes: cross-functional and cross-company environmental and social data provisioning, avoidance of silo thinking solely focused on economic development, and management of sustainability key resources. In strong collaborative relationships, data management is defined and controlled jointly.

3DCE (three-dimensional concurrent engineering) is a concept coined by, which is a potential NPD model supported by concurrent engineering. NPD literature focuses on support for concurrent engineering, early supplier involvement, understanding customer requirements, and channel structure. While 3DCE extends this view as it focuses on the product, processes, and supply chain simultaneous design through multi-functional teams early in the process that may include suppliers and customers. Implementing a new system and effectively managing processes requires active participation and engagement of top management to build a shared vision. These concepts, such as 3DCE and concurrent engineering, need to be extended to include sustainability concepts in NPD.