Companies are moving towards quickly providing better customer-centric products and services improve market share and market size with continuously growing revenue. As such, the effective collaboration among customers, developers, suppliers, and manufacturers throughout the entire product lifecycle is becoming much more important for the most advanced competitiveness. To address this need, a framework for product lifecycle collaboration is proposed in this study. The details of these collaboration models throughout the entire product lifecycle are depicted. As one of the key elements in product lifecycle collaboration, technology to support collaborative product manufacturing is proposed, developed and implemented in this study. It is hoped that the developed technology for collaborative product manufacturing will lay a frontier basis for further research and development in product lifecycle management.
Manufacturers are facing increasing challenges of better product quality with tighter delivery requirements for customers, more profitability shareholders. Global competition is increasing with pressure on prices, smaller orders, shorter life cycles, more suppliers, more governmental regulations, and increasing material and energy costs. These new business drivers make manufacturers pursue more competitive business model, such as collaborative manufacturing, to closely collaborate with their customers, suppliers, manufacturers and partners for the most advanced competitiveness by leveraging core competencies throughout the entire product lifecycle [1].
In collaborative manufacturing, product lifecycle management (PLM) has recently been recognized as a new strategic business model to support collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of product assets, including data, information, knowledge, etc., across extended enterprise from concept to end of life—integrating people, processes, and technology. PLM systems support the management of a portfolio of products, processes and services from initial concept, through design, engineering, launch, production and use to final disposal. They coordinate and collaborate products, project and process information throughout the entire product value chain among various players, internal and external to enterprise. They also support a product-centric business solution that unifies product lifecycle by enabling online sharing of product knowledge and business applications [2], [3] and [4].
As such, PLM enables manufacturing organizations to obtain competitive advantages by creating better products in less time, at lower cost, and with fewer defects than ever before. In summary, PLM not only provides process management throughout the entire product lifecycle, but also enables effective collaboration among networked participants in product value chain, which distinguishes it from other enterprise application systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), etc.
To tackle the collaboration challenges in PLM, this study begins with recent status review and gap analysis in Section 2. Based on the analyzed gap, a model for product lifecycle collaboration is proposed in Section 3. As one of the most important parts of in product lifecycle collaboration, the key technology to enable collaborative product manufacturing, which is collaborative process planning and manufacturing, is developed in Section 4. The detailed system design of such a collaborative process planning and manufacturing is developed in Section 5. A demonstration is given in Section 6. Finally, conclusions are made and future perspectives are given
To respond to new business requirements of effective collaboration throughout the entire product lifecycle to leverage core competencies, a framework of product lifecycle collaboration has been proposed in this study. The detailed technology, namely, collaborative process planning and manufacturing, to support the collaborative product manufacturing in product lifecycle collaboration, has been developed. The implementation of such a collaborative process planning and manufacturing technology shows the efficiency and effectiveness for collaborative product manufacturing, which in turn lays the frontier foundation for the future development of collaborative in the entire product lifecycle.
Future research will focus on the development of collaboration protocols in throughout the entire product lifecycle, including semantic and mathematical models, and heuristics, business rules, optimization algorithms to improve the performance of such dynamic collaboration among business value chain.
