Introducing Collaborative Practices in Small Medium Enterprises

In an enterprise, collaborative working schemes are obtained only by adopting a suitable organization of the enterprise functions. At the informative level collaboration can be enabled by using suitable project management tools for the exchange of information that is the basis of collaboration. One of these tools is Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). On the basis of an exhaustive analysis of the PLM impact on the different aspects of the enterprise, the paper proposes an original methodology to evaluate the possibility of using PLM as framework in which exploit collaboration links within the enterprise. The methodology is not founded on the formal declared organization but on the actual data flows that are induced by the relations among the documents used to develop a project. Data are collected on the field using questionnaires. The links are made explicit by applying the hierarchical clustering with single linkage agglomerative technique. The attitude to the implementation of PLM is then analysed with respect to the organization and to the informative system. Such methodology is general and can be profitably applied to assist the PLM implementation in the enterprises.