A unified product structure management for enterprise business process integration throughout the product lifecycle

Information availability is a key factor for business success and competitive advantage. While created by design engineers, product structure is accessed and referenced by other users involved in product lifecycle from various departments. However, there is a lack of efficient ways of managing product structure information for enterprise business process integration. This study proposes a unified product structure management model to fill in this gap. With this proposed model, the product structure is managed in a unified way and can be accessed by different people with various disciplines in the right formats throughout the entire product lifecycle, including business processes of quotation, sales order processing, design, planning, scheduling, production, and delivery. This research is part of the enterprise business information management system project whose purpose is to streamline the information management for key business processes to integrate multi-disciplines in an enterprise for product development. A prototype system has been implemented to verify the model developed by taking real cases in a mould-manufacturing company. The results show the potential for substantial improvements in industrial competitive advantage.