product data management

In many enterprises applying product data management, the level of implementation does not correspond to the best available technology and the enterprises’ real requirements. Also for many different reasons, basic functions in process-oriented support of change management are often used only rudimentarily. Subject of this article is a concept to support particular enterprises of make-to-order production in implementing general change management based on up-to-date functions of product data management. The available core competences are efficiently applied in order to overcome the difficulties that are associated with the reutilization of existing methods of resolution.

Modern enterprises are continuously advancing the IT-based realization of interconnected, world-wide engineering processes between customers, manufacturers, suppliers, and other engineering partners. But, available solutions are supporting this kind of enterprise and process integration as well as the integration of product data inadequately. Regarding this, at the Department of Computer Integrated Design (DiK), TU Darmstadt, appropriate solutions were developed. The derived solutions are enabling enterprises domain-independently to form effective virtual networks of organizations and to optimize processes of collaborative engineering. This can be done by simultaneously improving the magical triangle of time, costs and quality efficiently.

An efficient management of development projects needs reliable information about the current project status as well as likely but possibly implicit causes in case of project target abnormalities. The article describes a problem that e.g. a rising product complexity and variant variety results to a rapid product life cycle information growth and typically high resources expenditure to process reliable project status statements. To reach an effective solution to process reliable project status statements within development projects the article presents an approach to a systematic and integrated interpretation of existing digital product life-cycle information to reliable project status information. To realize the objective, the article presents a with project management principles extended PDM-system concept already prototypically realized with the military aircrafts EADS Military Germany and is already used for an efficient project controlling in the EF Typhoon project, successfully.