Web-Based Engineering Portal for Collaborative Product Development

Nowadays, collaborative product development has become a strategic necessity to develop high quality products at low cost and with quick response time to market demand. Past decades have seen significant advances to collaborative product development. However, Enterprises are still confronted with some problems. Firstly, the research in strategic level of collaborative product development is lacking. There are no formal processes and models for collaborative product development. On the other hand, the full alignment between information system and collaborative business is still missing. The information system cannot adapt to the fast changed business. This paper aims to provide the strategy and reference business model for collaborative product development. And then, to support the implementation of strategy and model, a workflow and web service based engineering collaboration portal is developed. The workflow is used to model and execute the collaborative product development processes, and the web service is the implementing technology of the portal. The combination of workflow and web service can fit the gap between business and information system and achieve on-demand business.