Collaborative Product Development in SMEs: A case study for CRC

Enterprise especially small and medium sized enterprises are facing more challenges in a globally competitive market. For SMEs with limited financial and technical capability, collaborative product development is a perfect solution. This paper presents some solution details based on result-chain modeling and enterprise´s working environment for CRC (Changchun Railway vehicle Co., Ltd). Client/browse/server architecture is used. Inside of the enterprise, a local collaborative environment is built based on PDM system, which keeps CAD models, CAE results and other know-hows safe, shareble, consistent and so on. Besides, an application server on InterInternetnet provides a bridge between the enterprise and our university. This Web-based collaborative platform achieves two main functions. 1) synchronous collaboration: multi discipline designers, engineers and researchers in different places can discuss and make a meeting through video-conference system. 2) distributed collaboration: workflow management module bases on RCM can support the control and supervising one the whole product development process. In this way CRC achieves CPC partly.