Towards Integrated Document Management in Networked Product Development

Product development (PD) in a network of collaborative companies is different from the traditional way of doing PD within single organization. Parallel way of doing PD increases the need for synchronization of PD activities, but the flow of design information in the company network is difficult to manage. There are indications that the automation of document management should improve the performance of networked PD projects. However, the dynamic nature of networked PD is an obstacle for this, as it requires such flexibility and speed from the setup and further maintenance of integrated document management that is currently unavailable. This article is a work-in-progress publication about research that seeks ways to reduce the setup time of integrated document management for a network of companies that collaborate on PD. This article reviews literature to create the basis for developing solutions to solve this problem, presents our suggestions, and define the following research steps in the road towards integrated document management in networked PD.