Learning from the lifecycle:The capabilities and limitations of current product lifecycle practice and systems

Design teams within the High Value Low Volume (HVLV) industry are facing ever-increasing challenges in developing new products. This has been largely due to the paradigm shift towards Product Service Systems, the growing importance of demonstrating Corporate Social Responsibility and stricter environmental legislation. With the variant nature of the design process within the HVLV industry and the longevity of the product life-cycles, it is recognised that learning from previous products is essential for new product innovation and development. The ability to do this depends upon the company’s product lifecycle practice and systems, and its inherent capability/limitations. To explore these issues, this paper maps typical data and information flow and the Information Systems involved, onto a generalised product lifecycle for HVLV. The map is generated from an extensive literature review and is used to critically appraise and reflect upon current product data lifecycle practice. In particular, its capability to provide design teams in the HVLV industries with sufficient data and information throughout the lifecycle phases of existing products to inform variant product design is considered

Trends in technology and their possible implications on PLM: Looking towards 2020

Belgium Herbarium image of Meise Botanic Garden

A social media framework to support engineering design communication

AbstractEngineering Design Communication (EDC) is fundamental to almost all Engineering Design activities as it provides the ability for knowledge and information to be shared between engineers. It is part of ‘what we do’. This communication contains a great deal of rationale relating to the evolution of Product Development and is essential for understanding ‘why the product is the way it is’. The need to support EDC is becoming more important due to the fact that Product Development is becoming more distributed, multi-disciplinary and involving greater re-use of past designs. With the advent of Social Media (SM), it is argued that there is the technical capability to provide more effective support for EDC within a computer-mediated environment. In order to explore this potential, this paper defines the requirements for the effective support of EDC through an extensive review of the literature. It then discusses the suitability of a SM approach and then presents the theoretical foundations of a SM framework to support EDC

Supporting engineering design communication using a custom-built social media tool - PartBook

AbstractEngineering Design Communication is the main tributary for the sharing of information, knowledge & insights, and is fundamental to engineering work. Engineers spend a significant portion of their day communicating as they ‘fill in the gaps’ left by formal documentation and processes. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that there is much extant literature on this subject. The majority has been descriptive with little prescriptive research involving the introduction of either a tool or process. To begin to address this, previous work reports a Social Media framework to support Engineering Design Communication and this paper builds upon this previous work through the instantiation of the framework within a custom-built Social Media tool hereto referred to as PartBook. This has been prescribed within an eleven week race car design project. The study addresses the validation of the requirements that underpin the Social Media framework as well as investigating the impact the tool has/may have on engineering work, engineering artefacts and engineering project management. In order to do so, data has been captured through user activity, system usability, questionnaire, semi-structured interview and informal feedback