Reducing parts diversity in product design: a data centered approach

To attract customers, manufacturers must design a large diversity of variants of products that suit to various requirements. But to reduce cost, manufacturers must reduce the diversity of components. We focus on part diversity, i.e. when two or more parts satisfy to the same need. Parts are described in several independent documents, or database, each one with its own information model. We claim that, to a large extend, part diversity results from lack of information and information exchange within the extended enterprise. So we propose to capture the whole part information through a single computerized representation based on the PLIB data model (ISO 13584). But designers must keep their own view of parts. So, various human-readable presentations will be generated from the PLIB representation by tools. One example is given. We discuss the creation of a database of fasteners in a manufacturing industry. We present the various steps to build the PLIB data model and we outline existing and in progress tools to generate various human-readable presentations (website in DHTML, paper document, ...). To appear in: Proceedings of CE'2003, Special track on Data Integration in Engineering, Madeira, Portugal, 26-30/07/2003