Collaborative process planning and manufacturing in product lifecycle management

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. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.