PDM: the essential technology for concurrent engineering

Concurrent engineering was heralded as the new panacea for manufacturing in the 1990s. The complexity of implementing the process through an organization has proved to be a major obstacle in achieving anticipated results: implementing it is a painful process in which a complete top to bottom understanding of an organization′s processes is needed. There are few organizations who understand their own dynamics. For concurrent engineering to be successful, cross‐functional design teams, along with their associated data, must be brought together. PDM assists in implementing a concurrent engineering strategy successfully because a PDM system provides the mechanism to capture and enforce a specific product development process consistently according to the way a company does business. Global companies which have already invested in PDM technology include: Xerox, Texas Instruments, Groupe Schneider, Honeywell, and General Electric.