Securing data quality along the supply chain

Abstract

Concurrent engineering in distributed development environments like those in the automotive industry places enormous demands on the organization of collaboration between the companies and departments involved. Efficient data communication in all phases of the product development process is a prerequisite for lean and flexible collaboration processes. Automotive suppliers that develop system components for a number of different OEMs or tier-1 suppliers face the challenge of ensuring that they make the CAD data available in the format required by their customers along with a high level of reliability and, if data translation is involved, that they take into consideration the system configuration of the respective customer. The main obstacle in this process chain is the insufficient data quality. This paper describes the approaches conducted in cooperation between the supplier portal www.opendesc.com and Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG.