Ensuring data quality beyond change management in virtual enterprise

Abstract

Concurrent engineering in distributed development environments like those in the automotive or aerospace industry sets enormous demands on the organisation for a close collaboration between the companies and departments involved. Seamless data communication in all phases of the product development process is a prerequisite for cost-optimal and successful collaboration processes. Automotive suppliers that develop system components for a number of different OEMs or tier-1 suppliers face the challenge of ensuring that they make the CAD data available in the format required by their customers and with a high level of reliability and, if data translation is involved, that they take the system configuration of the respective customer into consideration. The main problem in this process chain is the insufficient data quality. This paper describes the approaches taken in cooperation between the supplier portal http://www.opendesc.com and Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG.