Critical Issues for PDM Integration (R)
9/2/2005
Enterprise PDM reconciles disparate views and promotes enterprise-wide collaboration across multiple departments. In contrast, tight integration with authoring and simulation tools accesses fine-grain data to provide a detailed context for engineering knowledge and relationships. In meeting these very different requirements, PDM has to address different levels of information and processes necessary to support product development activities and their integration within the enterprise, extending to partners, suppliers, and customers. The need arises for a multi-tier architecture, from tightly integrated PDM to enterprise PDM, and similarly from PLM to ERP, due to the complexity of managing data models and processes along the full product development, production, and in-service support cycles.
Keywords: enterprise PDM, tight integration, product definition, value chain, VPDM, virtual product definition management, multi-disciplinary analysis, enterprise integration, knowledge management, design collaboration