Management of a Design System in a Collaborative Design Environment Using PEGASE

Abstract

PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) systems are deployed within companies to support product data structuring and management throughout the product development process. They manage information through document management and especially product data evolution using predefined workflows (Liu and Xu, 2001). Actual PLM systems integrate Internet-based technologies and offer groupware-like functionalities (Johansen, 1988; Eynard et al., 2002) for collaboration among actors. Several PLM systems have recently introduced project management functionalities (Saaksvuori and Immoen, 2004). Most of the time these functionalities allow the formalisation of tasks and milestones schedule. Nevertheless this project implementation reveals strong limitations if correlated with design coordination. On the one hand the management of deadlines and the modifications of task sequences can be made dynamically. On the other hand, it is not possible to ‘reuse’ predefined task sequences or to ‘redo’ specific ones as compared to workflow capabilities. Main limitation concerns the impossibility to drive documents life cycles from the tasks schedule. Concerning the SMEs, when implementing a PLM system in an SME, we face two antagonistic problems: first to improve the level of formalisation of information flows and second to keep a certain level of flexibility (Weber et al., 2002). To favour flexibility of the design process and coordinate them, formalisation has to consider the definition of the product and its evolution, the objectives of design constrained by the organisation of the company (Mintzberg, 1989) but also the factors that influence the system as technologies, human resources and physical implementations (Wang et al., 2002).