Managing Product Data and Design flow Process

Growing product complexity, large number of product variants and collaborative product development have made product data management (PDM) increasingly important for aerospace manufacturing companies. Modern product data management systems, enable enterprise, shortening development lifecycles by preserving and reusing its intellectual capital, taking advantage of new technologies like J2EE and XML. As a result PDM systems have expanded their functionality to become PLM (product lifecycle management) solutions. Automotive and Aerospace, the experts say, are the PLM bellwethers for the rest of manufacturing. Realizing that PLM/PDM systems are complex to implement we undertook a sample implementation to deepen our understanding of product data management in PLM environment. We used Teamcenter enterprise from EDS, to create PLM environment and instantiate our work, which involved an aero plane assembly. The paper describes, fundamentals of product data management, and related processes with instantiated examples. At the end, UML has been used to encapsulate workflow based collaborative design approach for described work