Collaborative Lifecycle Management in distributed environments

The increasing globalization of manufacturing enterprises and shorter product lifecycles along with the increasing outsourcing of product manufacturing and development tasks indicate the current trend in the market. This results in new challenges for IT systems and organizations to support the users in an optimal way. The Internet provides new opportunities for all involved people in the product generation process to collaborate. Data can be exchanged directly between Contractors, partners of customers. The Internet enables for example the communication of the deliverables to potential partners in the bidding process to fmd the most suitable supplier or contractor for a certain project. Offers can be faster collected and evaluated against each other. Efficient collaboration between members of a design team across different countries is possible. Product Data Management (PDM) systems provide the mechanisms to manage product information across the lifecycle of a product and the functions to provide up-to-date information to all users involved in the product creation and manufacturing processes. The quality of integration of different entities, partners, contractors or customers into the development process is a key factor to ensure the economic success of an enterprise. This paper describes the requirements and possible solutions for the distributed management of product information.