In June the company began using ActiveProject, a project Web site application produced by Framework Technologies. Not least among the benefits was saving thousands of dollars in air freight and travel costs. Paperless communication obviously saves money, but it has other, and potentially far more important, benefits. A number of trends taking place across disciplines in engineering favor broader use of project Web sites in fields beyond construction. In such a system an engineering project would be constantly in progress, every minute of every day, by passing the work from team to team in offices spread around the world.
Few companies are ready, either culturally or technically, for such a leap yet.
Indeed, the Internet firewalls that many companies have installed to ensure computer security can make it difficult even to exchange e-mails outside some firms. But test beds for globally distributed collaboration are in development and some are already running in some educational settings. At Stanford University, mechanical engineering professor Larry Leifer and his colleagues have developed a series of courses in which students work together in teams, usually of three students, with corporate partners on real design problems. In several of the projects, students at remote locations have worked as part of the team by using e-mail, teleconferencing, and the project's central Web site. The team made extensive use of distributed modeling tools, and its design went on to win the Gold Award in the Lincoln Arc Welding Foundation Graduate Design Competition.