Proposition of a PLM tool to support textile design: A case study applied to the definition of the early stages of design requirements

The current climate of economic competition forces businesses to adapt more than ever to the expectations of their customers. Faced with new challenges, practices in textile design have evolved in order to be able to manage projects in new work environments. After presenting a state of the art overview of collaborative tools used in product design and making functional comparison between PLM solutions, our paper proposes a case study for the development and testing of a collaborative platform in the textile industry, focusing on the definition of early stages of design needs. The scientific contributions presented in this paper are a state of the art of current PLM solutions and their application in the field of textile design; and a case study where we will present, define, and test the mock-up of a collaborative tool to assist the early stages, based on identified intermediary representations. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +33 144246341. E-mail address: [email protected] (F. Segonds). 2. PLM and its implementation in the industry 2.1. The evolution of work practices in product design In this part, we propose a chronological state of the art of the methods applied in the business world in order to improve their competitiveness. These methods, applied in the industrial world, seem to be at the heart of the issue of reducing product development time, which many businesses in the textile industry currently face. 2.1.1. Concurrent engineering Towards the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, two forms of design organization emerged as distinct alternatives: sequential design, which involves carrying out design tasks one after the other, and concurrent engineering, or integrated design [4–6]. Two of the aspects of Concurrent Engineering (CE) that distinguish it from conventional approaches to product development are cross-functional integration and concurrency. In CE, one must define shared interfaces between the various tasks. Indeed, CE is an approach to product development, in which considerations about product lifecycle processes, from product planning, design, production to delivery, service, and even end-of-life, are all integrated. By carrying out all these tasks in a parallel fashion, it becomes possible to reduce the time and costs of design, but also to improve the quality of products. With the development of Information Technology (IT), CE methods have evolved gradually towards PLM.