Challenges and solutions in customer process based on collaborative engineering

Due to the higher-level business trends, such as increasing globalization and outsourcing, the collaborative engineering gets more and more important. This increases the challenge for the suppliers to accomplish their customer processes optimally with minimal effort. Efficient data communication in all phases of the product development process is a prerequisite for lean and flexible collaboration processes. In this paper, specific concepts and solutions are described, as this problem can be solved from the perspective of a tier-1 supplier by using advanced IT technology based on contemporary standards. As a case study, the example of the company SKF is shown, one of the major bearing manufacturers for the automotive sector that develops on 14 locations worldwide and communicates with over 50 OEMs (original equipment manufacturer) synchronously. The recently implemented scalable solution fosters the customer process by ensuring the data communication in the right format, quality and time and achieving significant cost savings and error reduction.