Developement and Feedbacks of a New Communication Tool to Harness Information and Knowledge and Know-How in Integrated Engineering — Case Study at Eads

Abstract

Concurrent Engineering approaches heavily rely on reliable and efficient shared information among people involved in the design, engineering, industrialization and even manufacturing of products. In a context of an integrated design methodology, the nature of information exchanged by the design team evolves and enterprises tend to support this information through co-operative technology (CSCW). Thus, Non-Structured-Information becomes increasingly important within Integrated-Teams. Pieces of information flowing in this kind of teams are hardly controlled. Although informational aspects become more and more strategic, they are barely controlled. Indeed, it could be difficult to structure, share and access pieces of information to enhance Integrated-Team working and to capitalize knowledge and knowhow to learn from past experiences and to avoid doing the same mistakes twice.

In this paper, an approach is proposed and a simple groupware tool working on a network is proposed. The tool supports informal message exchange among users. It also provides facilities to structure and archive knowledge learned during this process. The tool has been developed and evaluated at EADS, especially to feed back design teams with manufacturing knowledge in the context of product change requests. Then a method to capitalize knowledge and know-how contents in relation with the tool is proposed.