4. Integration Framework and PPR^+H Hub for DiFac

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is a manufacturing paradigm that allows engineering contents to be integrated with all business processes through the entire product lifecycle in the extended enterprise. It extends product, process, and manufacturing resource (PPR) content knowledge into other enterprise business processes by coupling e-business technologies with manufacturing engineering applications, such as ergonomic analysis. To achieve concurrent and integrated ergonomic analysis in PLM, an integrated schema and a supporting platform that includes the PPR and human are essential. In this chapter, PPR^+H is defined and suggested as an XML-based integrated schema to manage and integrate all the information necessary for ergonomic analysis. And, this chapter introduces the PPR^+H hub for DiFac integration. It can extract PPR and human information from diverse legacy systems of a company and integrate them with DiFac applications. This approach includes the PPR and human information in PLM, and also includes the relations among these elements.