Facilitating collaborative business processes in the aero engine industry - towards Product Lifecycle Management and beyond

This paper reports on the different deployment phases during the passage from the introduction of engineering conferencing tools to the implementation of a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system and to the development of an engineering portal supporting collaborative business processes in the distributed engineering environment of the aero engine industry. The different phases are presented, the lessons learned from each phase are discussed and an outlook for the future is given.