Product engineering and design using global teamwork structures

Product engineering and design projects organized around the world following the sun, is a vision for the improvement of the product development process. This method of product development has the advantage that tasks can be worked on over 24 hours a day. The distribution of product development tasks enables companies to use the best competence of experts all over the world and to meet the requirements of different markets closer. Therefore product development processes are not only performed centralised at one location. Rather these development processes will be performed around the world in order to create high quality products by lower costs and in shorter time. Due to the increasing globalisation and internationalisation, the distribution of development tasks will become even more important in the future. On the other hand partners in a distributed product development process have to manage challenges concerning the intensity of collaboration, the flow of information and the engineering and design knowledge as well as cultural differences. For the planning and optimisation of distributed development processes it is neccessary to apply methods and tools for a virtual product development. The presentation will explain the new methods for cooperative virtual product development and will show how product data technology is being used. Conclusions will be given indicating future trends in introducing cooperative virtual product development into industry.