Targeted Convergence Corporation
Game-Changing Innovation with Collaborative Visualization Tools

Modern products and services continue to grow in complexity and sophistication; as a result, modern organizations need equally more sophisticated collaboration tools from their IT teams to help them deal with that complexity. “Since it is impossible for one individual to be an expert in everything, communication between different specialties stands as the key factor in making the right decisions,” remarks Brian M. Kennedy, Founder and CTO, Targeted Convergence Corporation (TCC). This is where TCC comes in with their Knowledge Briefs which are each a suite of collaboration tools for implementing lean practices including rapid learning & problem-solving, set-based concurrent engineering, and systemic knowledge reuse. TCC’s unique tools allow specialists to communicate their knowledge visually in a form that experts in other areas can understand and build on.

"For many industries like aerospace, defense, and medical devices, product failures cannot be tolerated and the growing complexity has lead to growing product development lead times," says Kennedy. Fortunately the visualization of different experts’ knowledge not only improves communication, but also enhances the reusability of knowledge from project to project. It allows teams to continuously make key decisions, keeping their development time constant. Better yet, this methodology actively moves learning to the front-end of the projects, eliminating the “surprise learning” that plagues the back ends of traditional projects. To better deal with the complexity, TCC’s product maximizes efficiency, helping customers to implement a process of “eliminating the weak” by establishing knowledge that separates the feasible from the infeasible. According to Kennedy, a major part of product lifecycle costs are locked in by decisions made through educated guesses in the front-end phases of product development. As there are too many unknowns and difficult trade-offs to consider, decision makers rely heavily on human judgment, which if goes wrong, disrupts the back-end development, resulting in significant rework and cost overruns. “In the end, if all the knowledge a company is capturing does not impact their key decisions, then it will have minimal impact on their bottom line. So, the focus should be on putting in place the right decision-making tools and processes and then allowing those tools to pull the right knowledge in the right form,” opines Kennedy.

In addition, the use of Microsoft technologies makes it easy on IT departments to adopt and maintain TCC’s software solutions, which in turn easily concerts with a client’s most-used tools. Also, Visual Studio and the larger development environment provided by Microsoft help TCC optimize their productivity. Sticking firmly to the “fuzzy” and abstract issues of the front-end, TCC believes in partnering with back-end tool vendors in order to refine their solutions. “We find ways to make it more lucrative for potential competitors to interface with us than to compete with us,” states Kennedy. “There are plenty of unmet needs such that none of us need to be reinventing the wheel.” Delivering releases at a high frequency and leveraging Microsoft technologies to keep a customer’s IT burden on each release low, TCC's innovative products have helped clients improve their performance by 3X and beyond.

In the end, if all the knowledge a company is capturing does not impact their key decisions then it will have minimal impact on their bottom line

Working with a large customer base, TCC works with partners in Portugal & Spain, Sweden & Norway, Japan, New Zealand, India, and the U.S. From a product point of view, the company’s next few releases will focus on dynamic planning tools, suitable for rapid learning environments. Moreover, the emphasis will be on innovation tools, complementing TCC’s existing knowledge visualization and trade-off analysis tools. Also, as part of their future plan, TCC is experimenting with several visualization and UI technologies. “One of our internal projects is directed at automated testing technologies that will allow us to further accelerate our release cycles, which will further increase our learning cycles with our customers and thus our innovation,” ends Kennedy.