Collaborative Product Development in Extended Enterprise

Excessive market competition, mass customization, growing product complexity is forcing enterprises to look for new initiatives. To take the lead in new product development, mergers and joint ventures are a common strategy. As the companies do not possess all the knowledge with in, they need to instead rely on other organizations, the result is, need of distance product development, which in turn requires huge efforts for collaborative product development, especially in case of aerospace and automotive. In this paper we investigate into the collaborative product development for complex products like aeroplane in an extended enterprise and also examine product design approaches being adopted by leading giants of the industry. There are claims of high gains by those who have adopted the systems(i.e. PLM solutions) that helped collaboration. We propose PLM based framework to enable collaborative product development. In this paper we also introduce a brief concept of design flow process activities for collaborative development