Business template generation for supporting collaborative design works in mould companies

Competitive and dynamically changing markets make design collaboration in a CSCW system essential for the mould industry. Design processes including design of a target product, parts, and assembly are essential in mould creation. Even though many systems supporting collaborative design have been implemented, they chiefly support technical difficulties from spatial and time differences such as data translation for heterogeneous CAD systems, and co-editing systems through Web access. However, they have focused on a specific process rather than considering the entire collaborative process of the real application such as collaboration between contractors and sub-contractors, collaboration among human operators in the shop floor, etc. These factors must be taken into account prior to system development in order to allow the system to function correctly. Therefore, we propose a new method, referred to as the POD method, to generate "business templates" focusing on three viewpoints to analyze business workflows, namely process, organization, and document. In order to use the POD method, we need to model manufacturing processes beforehand. To do so, we introduce our definition of process modeling and illustrate it using a case study. The POD method gives us a way to analyze business or manufacturing processes and generate business templates by extraction and deduction of business information. By using the proposed method, we have acquired a large variety of business templates, and they are currently being implemented as a Web-based collaboration hub system in Korea.