2000

Kääriäinen, Jukka; Savolainen, Pekka; Taramaa, Jorma; Leppälä, Kari

The electronics and electrical industries have become an important branch of industry in Finland. They produce products which are used in health care, industry, and every-day living such as mobile phones, industrial instruments and automotive electronics. In the global markets there are many competitors and companies seeking new ways to decrease costs. This hard competition forces companies to specialise and focus on a certain market-segment. Products are containing more functionality, and product development is a continuous process to fulfil customer needs. Developers have to master a range of technology and the total amount of product data is increasing. This report describes the requirements of the embedded product's design data management. Analysis covers different product technologies as well as development processes. The challenge of the design data management is to manage the total set of data related to the structure of the product during the product's life-cycle. The result of the analysis is the framework which represents the requirements of the design data management of the embedded product. This classification contains three subsets: data management, process and life-cycle management, and data capture and distribution. This framework is used to evaluate three commercial PDM systems. This consideration brings out the fact that the current solutions do not meet all the requirements of the embedded product's design data management.