A collaborative approach to otimised material selection

The increasing innovation pressure is one of the main market-dominating factors today. Therefore it is vital for companies to shorten product-cycles and speed up engineering-cycles. For such development environment parameters, Rapid Product Development (RPD) processes are proven to help solving the opposition between the two poles high quality and cost reduction. The RPD process is characterised by evolutionary and iterative phases taking place in distributed locations. Thus experts can come together quickly and discuss the problems online - the behaviour is only filtered by the computer assisted technology. Therefore especially in the early phases of product development communication between the different experts is indispensable to ensure highly innovative solutions or products. Also, to co-ordinate the interdependent parallel tasks throughout the process the development-phases have to be carried out collaborative. For example, choosing the best-suited material is of great importance for the development process and determines the characteristics and therefore the potential market success of the later product at a very high degree. A number of different experts like designers, engineers, salesmen, etc. are participating in various steps of the product-formation process, but not all these experts are also proficient in concerning material characteristics. So the synchronous and asynchronous collaboration of these decentralised experts is essential and has to be supported by networked systems using e.g. the internet. Based on the experiences made during our development of the distributed material information system MDB (Material Data Base), some recent problems and solutions of collaboration in product development are discussed. The MDB has been designed in conjunction with a world wide operating company and is actually used in their product development process.