Instruments to visualize design engineering information and activities in automotive supplier companies

Before implementing a PDM-system within a company, the internal processes of product and process development and the information handled herein should be organized well. To enable this organization, one should be able to see the bottlenecks. Therefore the working methods and the documents involved should be made transparent. That is why the development processes of three automotive suppliers are analyzed and documented in three representations, formatted according to a generic scheme, to gain transparency of the processes. Based on these representations a so-called induced model of product and process development is created. In this paper, which is an extension of [1], the format of the representations will be shortly explained, the application method for the realization of the representations will be described and some of the results will be illustrated. Also the research problems that came up during the research will be described.