10 th International Research/Expert Conference ”Trends in the Development of Machinery and Associated Technology” TMT 2006, Barcelona-Lloret de Mar, Spain, 11-15 September, 2006 STRATEGIES FOR DESIGN DATA REUSAGE OVER THE PROPIETARY 3D DESIGN TOOLS Darko Petkovic University of Zenica Faculty of Mechanical Engineering ul. Fakultetska 1, 72 000 Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina Stefano Tornincasa, Enrico Vezzetti Dipartimento di Sistemi di Produzione Politecnico di Torino Corso Duca Abruzzi, 24-10129 Turin, Italy ABSTRACT Product design and manufacturing are all intrinsically collaborative processes. From conception and design on through to project completion and ongoing maintenance, all points in the lifecycle on any product involve the work of fluctuating teams of designers, suppliers and customers. For this reason companies are in the process of creating a distributed design and manufacturing environment that enables integrated product, processes, and protocols development, finding effective methods for communication and sharing of information throughout the entire enterprise and the supply chain. Actually the ownership of the 3D models management tecnologies is stiill linked with the 3D CAD propritary even if the new trend is moving in the direction of new standard and technologies based on World Wide Web platforms. This new tendency tryes to extend the life of 3D product data moving these design information downstream thorough the entire product lifecycle. Unfortunately the actual lack of a unique 3D web-based standard has stimulated the growing up of a lot of proprietary and open source standards and consequently a production of an incompatible information exchange over the WEB. The paper proposes a structured analysis of web-based solutions, trying to identify the most critical aspects to promote a unique 3D digital standard model capable of sharing product and manufacturing data more effectively - regardless of geographic boundaries, data structures, processes or computing environment. Keywords: Collaborative design; Web3D, Virtual enterprise, Product lifecycle management. 1. INTRODUCTION Businesses today face three on-going challenges: improving customer intimacy, achieving operational excellence, and providing product leadership. Improving customer intimacy requires understanding and responding quickly to current and potential customers, their needs, establishing effective relationships with them, and providing consist, long-term customer value. Achieving operational excellence requires enterprises to focus on operating efficiently, effectively, and flexibly, working with their partners to reduce the cost and time necessary to deliver high-quality products that meet their customer’s requirements in a timely manner. Providing product leadership means delivering leadingedge products and solutions tailored to customer needs. All of these challenges require getting the right products to the right market, at the right time, for the right cost. To meet these challenges, businesses must become more innovative. However, being an innovative business doesn’t simply mean creating innovative products. It also means improving the processes a company uses to produce its products and how it supports its products using innovative approaches to the complete product lifecycle[1]. Today, innovation is recognized as critical for a business to maintain its competitiveness in the marketplace. Innovation must be achieved while reducing overall product-related costs across 1295