Initial Steps of Developing a Process Integrative Structuring of Documents Containing Product Information

Today’s companies need innovative products with more functionalities and decreasing time-to-market to survive in times of dynamic globalised markets. Thus, the products themselves and the required product development processes are very complex and difficult to manage. Therein, a major problem is to provide engineers with the right information at the right time which is aggrevated by the increasing amount of information. To fulfil the engineer’s task, they need to search for existing information about a product (input) such as interface relations, weight or functionality of a component and have to evaluate its relevance for their request. Since product information is mainly stored in a variety of different documents, reasonable structuring of them is essential to control the development process. Researchers criticise the lack of common structure and a lack of precise semantics of documents. Examples for structuring the documents are by function, form (geometrical) or manufacturing, but do not address the aspect of the document’s integration into product development processes. In the framework of workflow planning, this research aims at the support of this process integration by defining a structure of documents which is geared to the different development process steps an engineer is working on. Companies are expected to reduce their effort on process workshops where documents are integrated into the process manually. The process integrative structuring approach of this research has the goal to support the integration of documents into different process steps and activities which leads to a better retrieval of product information contained in the linked documents. At the current stage of this research, the considered process has not been defined yet. However, by following the approved standard product development process (VDI 2221) the development of an exemplary process integrative structure is possible. The approach supports the allocation of relevant documents considering the engineer’s process relevant demand and reduces time-consuming searching for relevant information.     «

Today’s companies need innovative products with more functionalities and decreasing time-to-market to survive in times of dynamic globalised markets. Thus, the products themselves and the required product development processes are very complex and difficult to manage. Therein, a major problem is to provide engineers with the right information at the right time which is aggrevated by the increasing amount of information. To fulfil the engineer’s task, they need to search for existing information...     »