Product lifecycle management in knowledge intensive collaborative environments: An application to automotive industry

Filipe Ferreira, José Faria, Américo Azevedo, Ana Luisa Marques
2017 International Journal of Information Management  
Today, manufacturing is moving towards customer-driven and knowledge-based proactive production. Shorter product life cycles lead to increased complexity in areas such as product and process design, factory deployment and production operations. To handle this complexity, new knowledge-based methods and technologies are needed to model, simulate, optimize and monitor manufacturing systems. Product lifecycle management research tends to focus on situations that are responsive to formal analysis
more » ... d modelling. However, in several domains such as knowledge intensive collaborative environments, it's not possible to model processes using formal notations. Knowledge based and collaborative process management involves a combination of structured and non-structured processes. Structured processes management can be reduced to a set of fully-defined rules leading to high efficiency but also low flexibility, whereas the management of non-structured processes is not prone to a full formalization. A combination of both structured and unstructured management approaches is required in order to achieve a successful trade-off between efficiency, flexibility and controllability. We call a process as semi-structured when it contains both structured and non-structured sub-processes leading to a flexible and efficient hybrid approach. Large enterprise information systems, impose structured and predictable workflows, while knowledge based collaborative processes are unpredictable to some extent, involving high amount of human-decision. Moreover, large enterprise information systems are not able to manage the daily ad hoc communication inherent to the knowledge-based process itself. This paper introduces a set of concepts, methods and tools of an innovative Hybrid Process Management approach validated by a real world business case in the automotive industry.
doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2016.05.006 fatcat:tyuzmqlxvnhbjdj4l2jkdmbmfe