Critical Capabilities for Successful Distributed Collaborative Product Development

Discrete manufacturing companies practicing distributed product development encounter challenges creating digital products, collaborating cross functionally in an organization and throughout the value chain, and controlling and managing product information and product development processes throughout the product’s lifecycle. This paper investigates the critical capabilities of a product development system for distributed product lifecycle management (PLM). A comprehensive product development system consisting of PTC’s Windchill PDMLink (control), Windchill ProjectLink (collaborate), and Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire (create - mechanical computer-aided design - MCAD) is presented in this paper with use cases and examples as a software solution for enabling distributed collaborative product development.