Autor: Dirk Langenberg

The development of medical high-tech products is associated with high costs for documentation as well as for risk and quality management. In addition, they are subject to tight regulations and licensing procedures. To meet these challenges, the use of new methods and information technology tools is worthwhile, especially in the medical device industry. The product life cycle management approach, which was developed in other industries, offers med-tech companies the potential of being sustainably innovative in the global competition.

Today manufacturers of complex investment goods concentrate on their core business and retrieve additional services from external subcontractors. Many design reviews are necessary to coordinate such cooperation. They cause high expense for manpower and for travel. In the research project “Digital Product Development with Virtually Cooperating Teams using Optical Networks” a new conference system will be realised, which utilizes Virtual Reality (VR). This paper describes the requirements and the process flow of future distributed design reviews as well as the method of solution which is prototypical realized in the project ProViT.