Autor: Dieter H. Müller

To cope with the hard global competition in shipbuilding and to secure a high volume of orders for German shipyards there is a need for strengthening research and development in shipyards. An economic development of ships needs a quick and distinct identification of product data as well as a high efficiency of the processes which are linked with these data. To achieve these demands an integration of a product data model and of a process model is necessary witch is described in this paper.

The handling of complex technical changes still is a highly critical process within the industrial practice. Hence, it very often comes to critical scenarios concerning key operating figures like time, product quality or expenses, which troubles the coordinated start of operations or the running of serial production. The aim of the article is to introduce a bundle of methods, which helps to integrate the process- and product views of the different engineering partners, in order to increase transparency and efficiency for the collaborative processing of product changes within engineering networks.

During the last years, marketing of products via the Internet became more and more important for both customers and manufacturers. However, most products sold today cannot be customised to satisfy the buyer’s individual requirements. Configuration functionality incorporated in current ERP systems as well as industrial product development software addresses the problem of fully automated design of products according to specification. However such extensive functionality is difficult to implement, requires extensive resources to run and a large part of its costly features offers no added value in an e-commerce context. E-commerce and the Internet in general pose a number of specific requirements as e.g. lightweight simple design, good scalability, interactivity, user friendliness etc. In order to meet these demands, a new method of configuration has been developed. This method focuses on non-automatic, interactive, user-friendly configuration of product variants based on a simple yet ...