Requirements for collaborative virtual engineering for SMEs with special focus on mobility aspects

The daily work, reach and scope of SMEs have expanded to global business relationships. This implies that "ad hoc collaboration around a table" with partners and customers is no longer feasible. Specialist engineers and managers are increasingly on the move, but nevertheless they need full access to all relevant business data, like drawings, calculations and/or reports and project state. An appropriate collaboration software system for these employees is needed to ensure full data access, to enable proper communication and to efficiently collaborate with colleagues at their "home base" but also with dispersed business partners while being on the move. This paper introduces and describes the bottlenecks and barriers of SMEs in collaborative engineering as well as the methodology for gathering SME requirements. Finally the collected and consolidated SME requirements for Collaborative Virtual Engineering for SMEs with special focus on mobility aspects are presented.