Integrated Product and Process Family Data Modeling for Product Lifecycle Management

Recognizing the importance of product lifecycle management in current manufacturing environment, we propose an integrated data framework of product and process families. The integrated data framework organizes all data of a product and the associated process families as a generic structure. Such integrated modeling lends itself to assist manufacturing companies in achieving design and production integration through managing product and process variety coherently. The unified modeling language is adopted in this research to shed light on the various elements of both product and process types and the complex relationships to be included in the integrated data framework. The framework has been tested in a local electronics company that produces a high variety of vibration motors for mobile phones.