A Product Lifecycle Management Framework to Support the Exchange of Prototyping and Testing Information

The modern perspective on product life cycle and the rapid evolution of Information and Communication Technologies in general have opened a new era in product representation and product information sharing between participants, both inside and outside the enterprise and throughout the product life. In particular, the Product Development Process relies on cross-functional activities involving different domains of expertise that each have their own dedicated tools. This has generated new challenges in terms of collaboration and dissemination of information at large between companies or even within the same organization. Within this context, the work reported in this paper focuses on a specific stakeholder within product development activities — the testing department. Its business is typically related to the planning and building of prototypes in order to perform specific tests on the future product or one of its sub-assemblies. This research project aims at investigating how results from testing activities can efficiently interface with other departments, in particular to offer relevant information feedback to designers. As a first step, a study based on an open source initiative is described to show how two natively disparate PLM tools can dialogue to merge information in a central environment. The principles applied in the study are then transposed to introduce a framework where information from prototyping and testing activities could be mapped and merged with design activities to match needs in a cross-functional setting.