Autor: Ralf-Stefan Lossack

In the internet age, collaborative product development has led to new challenges for OEM’s, suppliers and development partners. In the course of globalisation, engineering activities come together and companies are forced to follow innovative concepts concerning product development processes. This paper presents a framework to support dynamic product development processes for cross-cultural, global value constellations by providing semantic information model standards and suitable software components. The software framework serves as an open development- and integration platform for both information models and functions which cover the relevant aspects of cross-cultural engineering collaboration.

The changing market situation due to growing globalisation, the development of new technologies, as well as the strong competition forces today’s enterprises to employ innovative strategies in order to maintain their competitiveness on national and international markets. Many companies respond to this challenges establishing cross national co-operations. This policy is also applied in the field of product development. Nevertheless it becomes clear that many problems of a product development between distant located collaboration partners are based on cultural differences. Hence balancing and adjusting cultural differences is of pivotal impor-tance for the success of the project type.