Support of business processes flexibility in PLM systems using services based approach

Industrial companies collaborating to develop new products need to implement an effective management of their design processes and product information. Unfortunately, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) systems which are dedicated to support design activities are not efficient as it might be expected. Indeed, design processes are changing, emergent and non deterministic whereas PLM systems, based on workflow technology, don't support process flexibility. So, needs in terms of process support flexibility are necessary to facilitate the coupling with the business reality. Furthermore, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) enhances flexibility and adaptability of composed solutions. Systems based on SOA have the ability to inherently being evolvable. This paper proposes an approach to deal with business process flexibility in PLM systems by making profiles from SOA. The objective is to specify, design and implement business processes in a very flexible way so that business changes are rapidely considered in PLM solutions.