Enabling innovative concurrent engineering and collaborative manufacturing in extended enterprises

Nowadays, the competitive global scenario has driven companies to work within Extended Enterprises. In this context, the collaborative product design and development process have to take into account all the geographically dispersed manufacturing resources. In order to enable collaboration, companies can take advantage of the capabilities offered by Product Life-Cycle Management (PLM) tools to share and distribute data, information and knowledge. For studying the possibilities of these tools in Extended Enterprises, two Action Research cases are presented focused in companies within a ceramic tile cluster. The first case applies Data and Project Management functionalities of an ERP-Centric PLM tool, in a New Product Development (NPD) project. The second case applies Data and Workflow Management functionalities of a CAD-Centric PLM tool, in the coordination of process planning activities for distributed manufacturing. In both cases it is presented a methodology for preparing the implementation for the collaborative environments, emphasizing the advantages of each approach.