Identification of dependencies between product parameters and process stakeholders

Abstract

In today’s mechanical engineering companies, the rising interdisciplinarity of processes and development teams as well as distributed company locations leads to increased production times and more complex product development processes (PDP), although shorter development times are requested. Especially changes, e.g. component optimization or changed customer requirements, as well as parallel sub-processes, require increased planning to make dependencies visible and estimate expenses.When requesting a change to e.g. a component property, it is difficult to identify on the one hand which processes and technical parameters are affected and on the other hand which stakeholders have to be included in the decision making. It is not yet state-of-the art that stakeholders affected by a change in the PDP are identified and notified automatically by the IT-system. Furthermore, it is challenging to identify indirectly connected stakeholders, which are not linked to changing properties or processes, concerning the changes made.In this paper, a methodological approach is presented, that links the technical parameters with the processes and the different stakeholders, using the example of a PDP for light weight composite components.The procedure comprises the implementation of the PDP for light weight composite, including the process-dependent roles, in a product data management (PDM) system. The process structure is then linked to a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) tool. By building a system model, the product parameters are linked to the processes and roles. Using the established system model, the direct and indirect dependencies between the technical parameters and the stakeholders are visualized.