Product creation is facing the next level of fundamental changes. Global demands are growing substantially to achieve energy efficient and sustainable value creation networks for products, production and services without compromising traditional success factors such as time to market, cost and quality. To stay competitive within such an environment development partners in industry and public sectors will require new interplay solutions for engineering design execution, domain knowledge representation, expert competence utilization and digital assistance systems. This scenario offers the chance for virtual production creation solutions to become critical for the future by offering unique engineering capabilities which have not yet explored or deployed. The paper investigates key elements of modern virtual product creation-such as agile process execution, functional product modeling and context appropriate information managementtowards their competitive role in satisfying increasing numbers of product requirements, in delivering robust systems integration and in ensuring true sustainable product lifecycle solutions.
Today, product development is characterized by cross-company collaboration and an intensive exchange of product data. Engineers typically apply a multitude of digital engineering tools and act in diverse engineering processes. In a current study, the "culture" of today's collaborative product development was investigated in significant detail. The questions are: How do engineers work today? Which tasks play a major role in their daily business? How much time is remaining for core engineering tasks like design, calculation and design validation? How do engineers assess their workplace (environment)? Where are opportunities for enhancement of processes and digital engineering tools? In total, 1,401 engineers answered the questionnaires. Details of the study and selected findings are presented in this paper. Interesting findings are related to collaborative engineering and engineering design, Product Data and Lifecycle Management (PDM/PLM), virtual product creation, information and process management, and new media in engineering design.
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