An Adapted Method for Design Process Capturing to Meet the Challenges of Digital Product Development

Abstract

In our modern, interconnected and globalized world, design is in motion, to adapt to new situations. But successful Design in Motion must be based on Processes in Motion. For a target-oriented adaptation of the processes to the new, challenging conditions, the as-is procedures must be captured and analysed. For this analysis, established capturing procedures from production or administration cannot be used due to some special features of design processes and workflows, which will be discussed in this contribution. To compensate for the weaknesses of existing methods, we propose an adapted method for holistic design process capturing. With the procedure, we want to enable an economic process analysis, which is crucial for small and medium-size companies in particular. To give an insight into the practical application of the method, we exemplarily analyse the process of a shaft construction and FEM-evaluation by two different employees. Based on this analysis and to verify the relevance of the presented approach, an evaluation with respect to the requirements is done.

PADDME—Process Analysis for Digital Development in Mechanical Engineering

“…To transform processes into process models, process discovery is used, in which the focus lies on information capture [29]. There are different discovery models [40][41][42], which roughly follow a similar structure [43]. After an initial definition of the setting, level of detail, and boundaries, the information capture is performed.…”

“…Unfortunately, they are not widely spread in industrial praxis yet. One possible reason is the lack of sufficient process analysis approaches focusing on the crucial aspects for method integration and the identification of beneficial use cases for data-driven methods [43]. Additionally, the flows of data and information in existing processes lack adequate representation in established documentation approaches [67].…”

“…Therefore, this data and information documentation is not sufficient to analyse the processes with respect to the application of data-driven methods, since data are the critical basis for these methods. The transformation hereby crucially relies on the capture of existing processes and the analysis of their bottlenecks, as well as beneficial use cases for data-driven methods [43]. Summarising the mentioned characteristics of design processes, established process management tools are not directly applicable to design processes [64].…”

“…Often only development results are captured, but not the development procedure [65]. Furthermore, self-developed tools, used information, and data which are archived but not further used, are also not captured [43]. Lastly, most existing methods only focus on the capturing of the process.…”

“…• the method must be economical [68]; • correct representation of reality [68]; • comparability of different captures [68]; • consideration of knowledge, information, and data as well as their storage location [67]; • consideration of the variability in design processes [43].…”