FORFLOW

BAVARIAN RESEARCH ASSOCIATION FOR PROCESS- AND WORKFLOW SUPPORT FOR PLANNING AND CONTROLLING PROCEDURES IN THE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

2.1 - Situation-specific process planning and configuration

Field of work:

The objective of this project is to provide a methodical support for a flexible, situation-specific selection, adaptation and configuration of processes and corresponding methods in a product development workflow. This method shall support project planning as well as executing engineers in planning their work. Therefore it has to be analysed, which boundary conditions in- fluence decisions about which process step to take next or which method should be applied. Moreover a link between project and operative level has to be established. The main focus is put on the question which parameters and constraints (development task/problem, process results, former decisions, etc.) have significant influence on strategic decisions. Moreover the influence of these parameters and constraints are examined regarding the decision to use of specific methods and tools during the development process. It is intended to provide support for these decisions by an adequate tool. It will be analysed, how development processes can be planned, documented and reused taking into consideration the specific situational constraints in product development (e.g. new or adaptive design, specific requirements, etc.) A generic approach for process-planning is chosen, which will derive recommendations for further process steps based on an analysis and characterization of the development situation. Process steps, corresponding methods, tools and intermediate results as well as generic process-chains (e.g. strategic innovation- and planning processes, cooperation processes, etc.) will be documented in a process knowledge base. The elements of the knowledge base will be classified and combined according to the current development context. In order to enable efficient support in process planning, best practices have to be identified so that experience can be reused in planning new product development projects. This can be done for example by analysing the workflow by PDM-data. Best practices defined by experienced engineered shall be regarded as well. The result will be a methodology for situation- and problem-specific process planning which will be integrated into the collaboratively designed process navigator as a module.By this methodology it is intended to capture the complexity of development processes that results from the wide range of constraints and many different process paths. The process complexity shall be made manageable by providing suitable methods for documentation, retrieval and decision making in process planning.