An approach to characterize and evaluate the quality of Product Lifecycle Management Software Systems

Highlights

• An approach to characterize and evaluate the quality of Product Lifecycle Management Software Systems in the context of large enterprises in the aeronautical industry is provided.

• This solution is based on QuEF (Quality Evaluation Framework), adapted to offer a dynamic framework to select the best PLM solution for a particular environment.

• This solution supports both static and dynamic aspects, which could be customized for each situation.

Abstract

PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is an information management system that can integrate data, processes, business systems and staff in a company, in general. PLM allows managing efficiently and economically the information that all these elements generate from the initial idea to design, manufacture, maintenance and elimination phases of the product lifecycle. PLM has to include processes and tools to assure the quality of the final products. This way, it is difficult for PLM experts (from aeronautical or automation organizations, among others) to find an environment that suggests which is the best PLM solution that copes with their necessities. A number of PLM solutions are available for this purpose, but experts require a suitable mechanism to select the most appropriate one for the specific context of each organization. For this purpose, this paper presents a quality model, based on QuEF (Quality Evaluation Framework), that aims at helping organizations choose the most useful PLM solution for their particular environments. This model supports both static and dynamic aspects that may be customized for any kind of organization and taken as reference model. Particularly, our approach has been validated in the context of large enterprises in the aeronautical industry within a real R&D project carried out between our research group and Airbus.

Introduction

The market is being progressively globalized in the last decade. This process has been powered by strong technology development as well as transport infrastructure and telecommunications improvement all over the world. This evolution of the market has caused a revolution in the behavior patterns of consumers of goods and services. In fact, these consumers are demanding increasingly complex products with better design that suit their needs and expectations. Additionally, these products are manufactured in shorter periods of time and under cost constraints.

In this context, companies should accelerate their product development and manufacture, always taking into account the updated legislative regulation on safety, health and environmental pollution. Moreover, companies should consider distributed consumers in a global market, who are characterized by elements like cultural diversity and language barriers, among other features. These aspects add new challenges in production models and products management, as follows:

• Integrating within a single framework the partners that make up the company (e.g. suppliers, outsourcing, partnerships and multi-site activities).

• Reducing manufacturing costs of goods. In consequence, it is necessary to reuse parts of previously developed products, as well as to implement tools that can optimize the time of design, prototyping or production, for instance.

• Managing large volumes of data that often appear in a disorganized manner and without security access or manipulation.

These challenges can cause a reduction in productivity and quality, which can provoke great economic losses. There are phases in which companies must continue to keep some control over their products, for example, by interacting with users to identify new needs in future products, by evaluating possible deficiencies of their products or by providing services for recycling or removing their products.

All these factors make a need arise within organizations. It is related to having absolute control of products throughout their lifecycle, that is to say, during the product lifetime, from its conception as an idea to the stages of design, manufacture, support and recycling. The PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) paradigm was born to support these needs [1], [2], [3].

PLM is defined as a strategic business approach that applies a consistent set of business solutions in order to create, manage, control and disseminate all information generated along the lifecycle of a product. This approach allows integrating people involved in product manufacture, manufacturing processes, business systems and information systems.

Thus, PLM can be conceived as a business strategy that takes advantage of the latest Information and Telecommunication Technologies with the aim to manage data, processes, methods of work, staff and information systems that take part in the entire product lifecycle. Hence, it is key to provide software solutions to support this management. These software solutions are characterized by centralizing and organizing all data related to product development, providing security mechanisms for having access to information, integrating design processes with manufacturing processes, reusing the know-how among departments of the same company and incorporating software tools that support the PLM strategy (Computer Aided Design, Computer Aided Engineering or Product Data Management, for instance) with other enterprise systems (Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management or Supply Chain Management, among others).

This paper aims to study and understand the concept of PLM systems through an in-depth analysis of these systems that will allow defining its scope, domain, functionalities or benefits, among other aspects. It is important to mention that PLM is a broad concept that is sometimes understood as a container of some more sectorial solutions. Thus, it is very complicated to define a standardized feature model due to the heterogeneity it involves. This may be the reason why no standard model was found in the literature.

In this context, this paper focuses on defining a solution that allows characterizing PLM systems, in terms of specific features, in large enterprises categorized into the aeronautical industry. Although this solution is framed into the aeronautical context, it is important to mention that it was designed to be as much flexible as possible, thus it is considered to be easily applicable to any other field, while a formal validation of this guess belongs to a future work, according to a company's own nature and enterprise needs (background, internal organization or relative importance that a company gives to each aspect), which are essential. This is mentioned in [4], where authors argue about the key PLM functionalities for the particular context of a Collaborative Ceramic Tile Design Chain. This adaptability is possible because our solution defines a quality model conformed to the Quality Evaluation Framework (QuEF) [5], which establishes methodological guidelines to compare and evaluate entities (e.g., PLM commercial systems). There are many definitions in the literature that try to explain the concept of quality model, but QuEF refers to a set of characteristics and its relationships, which constitutes the base to identify quality requirements and evaluate them. This paper also presents a comparative evaluation of some of the most widespread PLM systems. For this purpose, thanks to the development of a real R&D project carried out between our research group and Airbus, we have defined a quality model based on a set of functional features. Finally, a subject for study and possible future research work is proposed with the aim of defining our quality model following the philosophy of Quality Continuous Improvement proposed by QuEF.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: after this introduction, Section 2 summarizes some of the most recent work related to PLM systems. Section 3 describes the QuEF in detail and its theoretical foundations. Then, Section 4 explains how the QuEF has been applied to define our quality model and Section 5 defines how this quality model has been instanced to evaluate and analyze each PLM systems. Finally, Sections 6 and 7 state our ongoing work and conclusions, respectively.