Information quality in PLM: A product design perspective

Abstract

Recent approaches for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) aim for the efficient utilization of the available product information. A reason for this is that the amount of information is growing, due to the increasing complexity of products, and concurrent, collaborative processes along the lifecycle. Additional information flows are continuously explored by industry and academia – a recent example is the backflow of information from the usage phase. The large amount of information that has to be handled by companies nowadays and even more in the future, makes it important to separate “fitting” from “unfitting” information. A way to distinguish both is to explore the characteristics of the information, in order to find those information that are “fit for purpose” (information quality). Since the amount of information is so large and the processes along the lifecycle are diverse in terms of their expectations about the information, the problem is similar to finding a needle in a hay stack. This paper is one of two papers aiming to address this problem by giving examples why information quality matters in PLM. It focuses on one particular lifecycle process, in this case product design. An existing approach, describing information quality by 15 dimensions, is applied to the selected design process.