product development

Nowadays the ramp-up of products is a decisive influence parameter in business competition, therefore it is a crucial component for the competitiveness of a company. Being able to place products on the market in shorter periods of development and at the same time improve quality, while managing constant diversification, is a challenge companies manufacturing series products must face. This paper is a style guide demonstrating actual weak points and problems in product development revealed by a survey and interviews.

Unlike common opinion the efficiency of product development projects can be increased by the application of workflow-management-systems. The basis for this provides a reference model for workflow-supported product development which classifies the required workflow types and software tools for the different tasks in the project. For the frequent case of a change management process it will be shown how different variants of this process can be configured through workflow modules and which interdependencies between workflow and project management system occur.

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.

Today, an efficient product ramp-up is a precondition of the success of a company. The ramp-up management provides the coordination and management of the ramp-up process. The Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation and the company Schnitzer Anlauf- und Projektmanagement GmbH has developed a tool for analysing the product ramp-up process in order to achieve potentials for optimization. Ramp-up projects can be evaluated and best practices can be identified.

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.