Product data sharing in a virtual enterprise

Complex industrial products, such as aircraft, are typically developed by multi-national strategic alliances of companies and an associated extended supply chain-often referred to as a Virtual Enterprise. Traditionally there has been a clear divide between the design authority and the supplier. The design authority specifies the component or equipment to be provided. A contract is then placed with a supplier who then designs and manufactures it. This approach can lead to situations where the original specification and preliminary design takes little account of the subsequent detailed design and manufacture. To redress this, there is strong commitment in most engineering organisations to embrace concurrent engineering principles. One approach to achieving this is to standardise on a set of CAD and Product Data Management (PDM) tools and use those throughout the enterprise. This is typically the approach of enterprises that have a stable kernel of companies and have been formed to develop a series of products. An example is the Airbus partnership. The four partners, British Aerospace, DASA, CASA and Aerospatiale have standardised on CADDS5 as a CAD system and Optegra as a PDM system. However, not all of the suppliers to Airbus are using the common tools, they may be using different CAD and PDM tools. Consequently, this data will have to be translated for it to be used by the Airbus partnership. One method to solve this problem is utilised by the SAVE project, which investigates data sharing in an extended enterprise linked by the Internet.