Abstract. The development process has to be modeled and documented for its reengineering and continuous improvement. A development process model is the basis for how a system will be designed. Due to the special nature of integrated product development processes, a method for process modeling has to be able to support and easily map the high interconnectivity between processes of different engineering disciplines over all hierarchies. The dominant elements in a model of integrated product development processes are the informational relations and flows.The analysis of models and textual documentation of the engineering processes in an automotive company revealed the special need for modeling concurrent engineering processes. Existing methods didn't support these needs sufficiently. Therefore, a single method for mapping and interconnecting the processes of all different engineering disciplines was agreed upon, which describes inputs and outputs (e.g. informational objects) for every process.The paper describes the reasons for an engineering process driven modeling method, the method itself and its application. Also, lessons learned from this approach are described.
For the reengineering of development processes and for its continuous improvement, the development process has to be modeled and documented. A process map is the basis for the way how a system will be or has been designed. The standard methods and tools for process modeling are mostly used for business process modeling and redesign. Due to the special nature of concurrent engineering processes, a method for process modeling has to be able to support and easily map the high interconnectivity between the process of different engineering disciplines over all hierarchies. The dominant elements in a model for concurrent engineering processes are the informational relations and flows between the different processes. These build the basis for an information-based engineering process.The analysis of models and textual documentation of the engineering processes in an automotive company revealed that different departments used quite different methods and tools for generating their process descriptions. This resulted in very heterogeneous process models with different degrees of detail that idea of client-supplier relations between different processes.A detailed market study was conducted, in which about 30 tools for business process modeling (e.g. ARIS, Bonapart, IDEF, Facets, etc.) were analyzed and evaluated by a variety of criteria. None of these tools met the requirements of the project partner, not only conceming the method, but also conceming supporting factors like easy and fast input of data, multiuser and database support. Another important factor was the fact, that the process model also should be the basis for project planning and scheduling. Hence, a smooth data flow from process mapping to project planning and scheduling should be possible. Therefore, in order to meet all requirements a special process modeling tool was developed which is based on the same database as the project planning tool already in use. The paper describes the reasons for an engineering process driven modeling method and its use, as well as the rationales for developing a new software tool. Also, lessons learned from this approach are described.
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