Collaborative Engineering

Collaborative Engineering offers companies new possibilities to involve their suppliers into the product development process. The requirements which a successful approach for internet-supported supplier integration has to fulfil are exemplified for the ship building industry. Flexibility and low implementation effort of the chosen solution turn out to be, together with appropriate functionalities to support the distributed cooperation, decisive success factors.

The company-spanning collaboration offers companies the chance to exhaust new market potentials by in- creasing their innovation capability and productivity. An important prerequisite therefore is to optimally support knowledge networks and especially the corresponding knowledge exchange and problem solving processes. In the context of the project TRUST an approach was developed to enable companies and respectively their employees on the one hand to provide knowledge needed for problem solving. On the other hand the employees have access within an integrated working environment to experiences, know-how and competences of the knowledge network to solve their specific problems and to develop their individual domain competence.