Abstract
Keywords: Product Information Exchange, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Supply Network, Neutral File, Bill of Material (BOM)
Nowadays, most manufacturing industries are in confronted by rapidly changing of market requirements and tremendous pressure of technology developments. As the product development requires shorter lead-time and faster response for the market demand, closed communications and collaborations are required. In traditional way of engineering, each system is commonly operated in an isolated environment, and efficient communications with each other are difficult to achieve. This causes waste of time and cost on the hardware, software, human resources, and also causes inefficiency in the product development and production. PLM(Product Lifecycle Management) and new IT(Information Technology) are the most powerful approaches to solve these problems. PLM is one of innovative manufacturing paradigms which leverage e-business technologies to allow a company's product content to be developed and integrated with all company business process through the extended enterprise. For the successful achievement to PLM, the management, creation, collaboration of all product and manufacturing related information is essential, and the exchange of product information is core part of PLM business process. This paper proposes the methodology and prototype system for product information exchanges and integrated managements in automotive supply network. This approach architected by using ooCBD(object oriented component-based development) which can analyze and refine from the use case model to implementation test. Then, we define a BOM(Bill of Material) neutral file that is XML(eXtensible Mark-up Language) format based on the PLM Services, an international standard. PLM Services is an articulate PLM data model schema to exchange product information. Eventually, we implement the software modules to support data exchange between commercial PDM(Product Data Management) systems of diverse suppliers. In this research, we implemented for Teamcenter Engineering and SmarTeam, which are popular commercial PDM systems. Using this product information exchanges and integrated management in the engineering collaboration portal, and suggested neutral file for BOM, many engineers in supply network can share their product information and knowledge in a fast, integrated and convenient way.