2 management - School of International Business and ...

415 Production in the Global Environment – Analysis and Best Practices
involved companies into the same computer model, across time and geographies. So it is not
necessary anymore to work together in the same location. In addition a knowledge data base
is part of this system, highlighting all design groundrule violation to the individual engineer, and
correcting them automatically or ask for correction. This process is called Digital Mock Up (DMU)
or virtual prototyping. A 3D CAD Model of a BMW Model 3 is shown in Figure 3, together with a list
of the main advantages of such a design system. The first commercial usage of such a system,
was the development of the Boing 777 airplane, linking 2600 engineers together into one system.
Today all cars, ships, planes and most consumer products are designed this way. A side effect,
which should not be underestimated is the early availability of knowledge about the new product,
before it was ever built, and later problems in manufacturing, as well as required engineering
changes are significantly reduced.
3 PRODUCT DATA MANAGEMENT
Figure 4 | Block Diagram for an integrated Computer Archtecture using PDM
Since today most of the development and design is done virtually in the computer, with no paper
blueprints available any more, the key question is, how to transfer the design data to manufac-
turing, which is using numerical controlled machines and has a computer controlled shopfloor
system. So the challenge is how to link the used computer systems from development and man-
ufacturing, and this across different factories in different countries. The complexity is further in-
creased since there are many different application software releases and vendors installed from
the past. The software system linking all of the other applications is called Product Data Manage-