Product LIfecycle Management, Knowledge Integration and Reliability in New Product Co-Development: A Case Study Between Europe and China

An important question for IS researchers and practitioners is how IT can improve new product development (NPD) in an international co-development context. More precisely, this paper aims at understanding how Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technology contributes to NPD knowledge integration and to process reliability in this environment. It is based on a longitudinal case study of a French industrial Group with design teams located in Europe, and which had greatly increased co-development work with China at the time of the study. The first author participated in PLM implementation in Asia over the course of four years. Data analyses indicate a reduction of glitches, from which we infer a positive contribution of PLM to process reliability through knowledge sharing and coordination of mature objects. Indeed,PLM use supports commissioning rather than mediating objects and close rather than open design specifications. Glitches related to knowledge transformation problems are not eliminated with PLM.