A Data Map for Product Creation: Tasks, Data Flows, and IT-Systems from the Initial Idea to the Start of Production

Abstract

Digitalization is changing the way products, services, and production systems are developed. Numerous different software tools are increasingly being used along the product creation and development process creating large amounts of data and data sources. Yet the fragmented tool landscape leads to data silos within the individual product creation cycles and domains. Especially in the context of today's cyber-physical systems, dependencies between various authoring systems, processes, and information lead to high complexity within its creation process. Often, industrial companies are lacking a systematic and visual overview of data, data flows, and IT systems. For this purpose, a data map for product creation was developed. In general, the data map illustrates the data flows between data sources from product creation and IT systems used in product creation, taking into account their properties and the process context. Employing design science, 274 activities with 318 associated data artifacts as well as IT systems and their interconnections with each other were identified and represented graphically. The result improves the visibility of data and opens new possibilities for optimizing the product creation process. Furthermore, the data map can be used for the identification of artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven potentials in product creation.