A WWW-based Collaborative Design and Manufacturing System for rapid mould product development

Most manufacturing companies have realized that the ability to quickly develop a customized product through an economic and efficient way is critical for them to survive in the keen competitive global market. In order to shorten the lead time to market, the product design and manufacturing requires designers and engineers from different departments of the enterprise to work together within a collaborative environment to accomplish a common mission. In this paper, a WWW-based collaborative design and manufacturing system (WCDMS) is proposed to support current product development, which enables team members in geographically distributive locations to carry out product development activities simultaneously and collaboratively. A knowledge base is developed to provide designers and engineers with complete information about the existing and the under developing products to support injection mould product development. A prototype system is presented and implemented using Web technologies and .Net programming languages to demonstrate that the proposed WCDMS system is beneficial for injection moulding manufactures to reduce the amount of reworks and shorten the product development cycle.