Collaboration planning framework (CPF) to support distributed product development

Current marketplace is undergoing major changes that will affect the way organizations conduct their business. Organizations need to respond to a geographically dispersed marketplace. This can be achieved by leveraging globally distributed resources to fully understand and interpret individual customer needs. That is, organizations need to integrate their operations (product development) in a way that will allow dynamic response to market changes. Computer-supported collaborative engineering could provide the integrating mechanisms needed to integrate distributed operations. The change to collaborative engineering should be based on sound and comprehensive methodologies that can analyze current practices, assess their ability to be performed collaboratively, restructure organizational practices to enhance their performance in a collaborative environment, select appropriate tools to support practices, and provide an implementation plan. This paper presents a framework to build computer-supported collaborative product design and development operating in a distributed environment. The framework is composed of six modules that provide a systematic procedure to plan for computer supported collaborative engineering.