Small and medium enterprises (SME) in the automotive supplier industry are facing rising demands concerning cost and quality of the parts or assemblies they are manufacturing for their cus-tomers. Additionally, the “time-to-market” has to be reduced. Applying traditional methods for rationalization is not sufficient to cope with these requirements. Furthermore, flexible, open, and efficient business processes and technologies are required in the early stages of the product life cycle. In this contribution, the potential of solution approaches based on collaborative, virtual product and process design and optimization is introduced. An example of a metal forming process in automotive supplier industry is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.
