Chapter 2: Collaborative design and manufacturing

Title: Involvement of salesmen in collaborative design using DMU

Author(s): Emilien Massias, Roberto Sorito, Dominique Deneux

Address: Robert Bosch GmbH – Robert Bosch Str. 2 – CR/APC2 – 71701 Schwieberdingen Germany LAMIH – UMR CNRS n°8530 – Université de Valenciennes Le Mont Houy 59313 Valenciennes cedex 9 France | Robert Bosch GmbH – Robert Bosch Str. 2 – CR/APC2 – 71701 Schwieberdingen Germany | LAMIH – UMR CNRS n°8530 – Université de Valenciennes Le Mont Houy 59313 Valenciennes cedex 9 France

Reference: International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 2005 pp. 101 - 112

Abstract/Summary: During the last decade, the market has known significant evolutions, characterized by a demand for innovation, higher quality, shorter time-to-market and lower costs. This tendency is still increasing today and companies are facing new challenges, while at the same time they have to manage the growing complexity of products and the difficulties of internationalisation. These trends are even more crucial in the automotive market, where competition is ruling the system. The suppliers in this sector need to optimise their intern, but also extern collaborations [4, 5, 12, 17]. Nowadays, new technologies help people work together in virtual environments, visualize Digital Mock-Ups (DMU) of products at the same time in different places using online conferences. Virtual environments allow development teams to communicate easier by exchanging product data. As a result, lots of unnecessary travels can be avoided and the collaboration can be improved, in terms of quality, contents and frequency. The goal of this paper is to present a current case study in the automotive industry. It focuses on the Product Creation Process (PCP) at Bosch. All the teams involved in the PCP are concerned by collaboration improvements: development teams, production teams but also, and it will be the centre of the study, sales teams. The improvement of the collaboration between salesmen and the other participants in the PCP inside Bosch, but also with customers is a key issue. The current situation has been analysed, so as to prepare the elaboration of an improved collaboration process, with the objective to help the salesmen improve their communication with the customer, based on 3D models. After a short introduction, the paper tackles the issue of improving the collaboration between salesmen and other project members. The first section discusses the new technologies and methods, which can be implemented. The second part details the elaboration of a new scenario related to a use case and its investigation in the sales process. The benefits brought by this work are presented in a third part. A presentation of the way to generalize this work constitutes the last part.

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