From Design to Production Control Through the Integration of Engineering Data Management and Workflow Management Systems

At a time when many companies are under pressure to reduce "times-to-market" the management of product i nformation from the ea rly stages of design through assembly to manufacture a nd p roduction h as become increasingly important. Similarly in the construction of high energy physics devices the collection of (often evolving) engineering data is central to the subsequent physics analysis. Traditionally in industry d esign engineers have e mployed Engineering Data Management Systems (also called Product Data Management Systems) to coordinate a nd control access to do cumented v ersions of product designs. However, these systems provide control only at the collaborative design level and are seldom used beyond design. Workflow management systems, on the other hand, are e mployed in industry to coordinate a nd support t he more complex and repeatable work processes of the production environment. Commercial workflow products cannot support the highly dyn amic ac tivities found both in the design stages of product development and in rapidly evolving workflow definitions. The integration o f Product Data Management with Workflow Management can p rovide support for product development from initial CAD/CAM collaborative design through to the support and optimisation of production workflow activities. This paper investigates this integration and proposes a philosophy for the support of product data throughout the full development and production lifecycle and demonstrates its usefulness in the construction of CMS detectors.