Christophe Merlo

Information system modelling for engineering design co-ordination

The management of design projects becomes crucial according to social, economical and technical environment of companies. To improve design co-ordination performance the GRAI Engineering method is proposed. It allows to analyse an existing design system and to design a new one according to the enterprises strategic objectives. Based on reference models and knowledge modelling, this method requires the definition of a collaborative information system to assist design actors. An object-oriented approach based on UML language is used.

Compared implementations of PDM systems based on UML specifications

With regard to product development processes, the PDM (Product Data Management) system aims at the management of product data and related documents. The specification and implementation of such a system strongly depends on company needs and also on the system characteristics. Generally the PDM system requires a specific way of structuring product data and its management. In recent works, the use of the UML approach has been proposed to formalise the specifications in order to enable the implementation of a PDM system. The main goal of this paper is to study the implementation of such UML based specifications through two different PDM systems, in order to assess their functionalities according to the needs of product development process management. The case study used is extracted from a turboprop aircraft project.

Analysing collaborative practices in design to support project managers

The subject of the current paper is the collaborative practices used in the product development process in SMEs (small and medium enterprises). The starting point is an empirical study, part of industry-based fieldwork on the introduction of a product lifecycle management (PLM) system. Our results highlight the need for new approaches to take into account the socio-technical complexity of the collaborative processes. A new tool named CoCa is proposed to analyse collaborative practices in situ. This tool is designed to be used by researchers, consultants or, eventually, project managers in order to track all the collaborative events and the project context. The background and industrial case study, the theoretical basis and design of the tool are described and, finally, some indication is given of its potential use in gaining understanding of complex collaborative processes and in improving design coordination.

CoCa: a tool for analysing collaborative practices to improve design process management

This paper focuses on the coordination of engineering design from the collaboration point of view in order to help managers in controlling design processes. We focus on the organisation and process aspects to facilitate collaboration between designers and to foster the coordination of design projects by integrating the product, process and organisation points of view (PPO model). Indeed, the results of the collaborative design activities directly depend on relationships between design actors. Our aim is to allow project managers to enhance and control different types of collaborative processes in order to prescribe emerging collaboration between different experts. We propose then a method for storing and analysing collaborative processes in situ, in order that such processes can be formalised and re-used by project managers. This method is supported by a dedicated and implemented tool, called CoCa. A case study in an SME, designing and manufacturing innovative mechanical products, has been carried out to evaluate the possible feedback to design coordination, in particular by managing collaborative processes through PLM systems workflow technology.

Integrating Competence Management into a Coupled Project-System Design Management

Competence management has recently become an important issue in companies. Closely related to knowledge management, it considers the capacities of an individual to perform by using his/her knowledge. This knowledge management becomes a tool for companies to manage human resources in the long run. The ability to characterize useful competences, to evaluate how they are improved through past experience and successive jobs occupied, and thus to select project team members according to fully or partly existing skills are some of the concerns that business managers have to tackle. This paper focuses on the coordination of design activities in order to propose a tool dedicated to project managers on an operational level to manage skills for better team building. The aim is to improve team performance in the short and long term while preserving a link with the human resources department. Our work is based on the results of the ATLAS project which studies the coupling between systems design and management. We propose an initial tool to manage skills in a design project.

PEGASE: a prototype of software to manage design system in a collaborative design environment

The control of the design process requires to take into account three narrowly overlapping dimensions relating to the product, as an object to be defined, the process, as a generator of this object and finally the organization. Within the framework of the work undertaken during the IPPOP project, an integrated model was proposed with a view to development of a prototype of software. We are interested here in the software tool which can be brought to the actors to manage design process by correlating the organization of the company and the definition of product development process with the structure of the design projects and the control of the real process. This tool is materialized by the development of the PEGASE software for which we present an application inspired of an industrial case study in SME.

Instrumenter l'informel dans les phases amont des projets de conception innovante

Les phases amont des projets de conception peuvent etre des periodes propices a l’introduction d’innovations technologiques dans les produits. Lors de ces phases, les processus de cooperation et de confrontation des differents points de vue entre les acteurs impliquent des echanges d’informations qui sont parfois informels, non contractuels et peu ou pas structures. Pourtant, ces phases de negociation et de prospective constituent des enjeux tres strategiques pour la diffusion de l’innovation. Dans le cadre d’une etude de terrain industriel, l’observation participante de l’emergence de solutions innovantes nous a conduits a elaborer un environnement collaboratif specifique denomme ID2 (innovation developpement et diffusion). Cet outil propose une structuration semi-formelle des informations manipulees afin de favoriser les interactions entre les acteurs et la diffusion de l’innovation. Dans cet article, nous etudions dans quelle mesure les principes proposes dans ID2 peuvent etre mis en œuvre dans une configuration particuliere d’un systeme de gestion de donnees techniques (SGDT) generique. Nous appuyons alors notre propos sur le maquettage du SGDT Windchill (PTC) et nous montrons les limites des deux outils proposes.

A regulation mechanism based on work activity to improve Lean approach

Companies adopting Lean increase their productivity, quality of product and delivery in the short term. But in the medium term, these performance criteria are mitigated by events such as absenteeism, sickness leaves, turnover, etc. To explain this, Occupational Health scientists identify contradictions between the components of Lean and human functioning. One of these contradictions relates to the regulation mechanism of human work activity, specific to human functioning, which would be inhibited in a Lean working environment. In this article, we focus on the integration of this mechanism in the Lean performance approach and, to illustrate our approach, we choose the example of semi-finished stock lying between each workstation: the ‘work in progress’ inventory. We propose to use a performance indicator that measures the need of ‘work in progress’ inventory taking into account the regulation mechanism of the work activity. We call this indicator “number of regulating ‘work in progress’ inventory”.

Best practices assessment in requirements engineering tools integration

Companies can use methodological software tools to perform requirement engineering. Those methodological tools are increasingly developped by external software editors and integrators. The performance of the tools is not enough to ensure efficiency of methodology application.This paper is part of a PhD research programm. This research program focuses on the way of integrating requirement engineering tools into product design department with a provider perspective. To be more precise, this research project emphasizes on modifications occuring during integration phases. In order to evaluate and to improve integration process, key indicators can be proposed. From the first stage of integration to the moment the user is autonomous, key integration factors often change. For example, requirements of the user, user environment, product life cycle, delay for integration, actors, … This paper aims at proposing surveys to identify those changing key factors. Then, first best practices elements are given to counteract the possible negative impact on efficiency of requirement engineering tools integration and thus, on product development. In fact, this paper goes further into the way to analyze the existing system. It notably deals with first elements from industrial survey on IT vendor and their customer perspectives on tools integration. In addition, preliminary survey results on customer dissatisfaction are proposed and analyzed. It also proposes a short case study and further research work in order to assume those first results and to bring to the definition of integration approach for methodological tools in engineering domain.Copyright

Management of a Design System in a Collaborative Design Environment Using PEGASE

PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) systems are deployed within companies to support product data structuring and management throughout the product development process. They manage information through document management and especially product data evolution using predefined workflows (Liu and Xu, 2001). Actual PLM systems integrate Internet-based technologies and offer groupware-like functionalities (Johansen, 1988; Eynard et al., 2002) for collaboration among actors. Several PLM systems have recently introduced project management functionalities (Saaksvuori and Immoen, 2004). Most of the time these functionalities allow the formalisation of tasks and milestones schedule. Nevertheless this project implementation reveals strong limitations if correlated with design coordination. On the one hand the management of deadlines and the modifications of task sequences can be made dynamically. On the other hand, it is not possible to ‘reuse’ predefined task sequences or to ‘redo’ specific ones as compared to workflow capabilities. Main limitation concerns the impossibility to drive documents life cycles from the tasks schedule. Concerning the SMEs, when implementing a PLM system in an SME, we face two antagonistic problems: first to improve the level of formalisation of information flows and second to keep a certain level of flexibility (Weber et al., 2002). To favour flexibility of the design process and coordinate them, formalisation has to consider the definition of the product and its evolution, the objectives of design constrained by the organisation of the company (Mintzberg, 1989) but also the factors that influence the system as technologies, human resources and physical implementations (Wang et al., 2002).