Traceability and management of dispersed product knowledge during design and manufacturing

Abstract

50 pagesInternational audienceProduct development processes comprise highly creative and knowledge-intensive tasks that involve extensive information exchange and communication among geographically distributed teams. Due to the geographical and institutional separation between the different systems involved in the product lifecycle, retrieving, sharing and exchanging product knowledge is becoming a key issue in information systems of extended enterprise. This paper addresses the issue and challenges of product knowledge traceability during the product development. The aim of this research effort is to enhance the exchange and use of product knowledge acquired during the development process. In order to satisfy the needs for acquisition and reuse of product knowledge, a product knowledge representation framework is proposed. Key elements to support traceability during product development process are identified. The key idea behind this research effort is based on the premises that an important step towards achieving product knowledge sharing is providing traceability across various product knowledge elements that are used in product development phases, i.e. design and manufacturing. Two complementary case studies illustrating the benefit of traceability are presented. The potential role of traceability is described, first to support the decision making process during engineering change management, and second to support product oriented modelling for knowledge sharing and exchanging to meet quality requirements

Developing a Framework for Traceability Implementation in the Textile Supply Chain

“…Traceability information should be reusable at any point when it is necessary. The textile supply chain consists of multiple players, therefore it is important for all of them to understand and exchange the traceability information and use the uniform/standard semantics for information exchange [8,26].…”

“…Flexibility is particularly important regarding today's short-lived fashion, where fashion trends change quickly [7]. However, due to geographical separation and institutional differences between different partners, effective information sharing has become a key issue and inadequate information sharing hampers the flexibility and synchronous functioning of the textile supply chain [7,8]. Information is a value creating entity in the modern textile industry, which relates to transparency, product safety, and supply chain management.…”

“…Presently, organizations tend to use Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Product Data Management (PDM) to organize the product and/or process specific information locally [8]. However, the lack of explicit semantics and the content of information are major problems towards integrating and exchanging the locally stored information among different partners in the supply chain.…”

Rapid productisation: challenges and preconditions

“…If a company is not able to control product-related data, it will also be difficult to get the product management under control (Stark, 2005). The effective sharing and utilisation of product data is necessary when it comes to enabling rapid product launches (Huang et al, 2004;Ouertani et al, 2010;Philpotts, 1996;Sulaiman, 2000).…”

Several Aspects of Information Flows in PLM

“…Because of emerging information and communication technologies, it is no doubt that there are more complex information flows over the whole lifecycle. As Ouertani et al (2011) mentioned, querying and sharing product knowledge is becoming a key issue in enterprise information systems. Hence, the success of PLM lies in identifying what kind of information are available in the other phase, and how we can use them in order to streamline business processes.…”