International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 1 Copyright © 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Assessment of item-specific information management approaches in the area of heavy load vehicles Cecile Corcelle 1 , Kary Främling 2 , Lutz Rabe 3 , Jürgen Anke 4 , Jouni Petrow 5 1 Caterpillar CATERPILLAR France S.A.S 40, Av Leon Blum, BP 55, 38041 GRENOBLE Cédex 9, FRANCECrawler CORCELLE_CECILE@cat.com 2 Helsinki University of Technology PL 5500, FI-02015 TKK, Finland Kary.Framling@hut.fi 3 Bremen Institute of Industrial Technology and Applied Work Science Hochschulring 20, 28359 Bremen, Germany rab@biba.nui-bremen.de 4 SAP AG, SAP Research CEC Dresden Chemnitzer Str. 48, 01187 Dresden, Germany juergen.anke@sap.com 5 Trackway Salomonkatu 17, 00100 Helsinki, Finland jouni.petrow@trackway.eu Abstract: Product lifecycle management (PLM) is often considered an inter- organisational issue, where only organisations produce product information. This view fails to take into account the products themselves as information providers, which occurs mainly during the product’s usage phase. The required item-specific information management infrastructure may be a challenge for traditional information systems. In this paper, we study how different approaches of centralized versus distributed information management are suitable for item-specific information management. A real-life PLM application is used for deriving generic assessment criteria. These criteria are then used for assessing the different approaches against the specific application. The results of the paper are the following: 1) a description of different approaches for implementing item-specific information management and 2) a set of assessment criteria for evaluating the approaches and 3) an example assessment for a specific PLM application. Keyword: Product Lifecycle Management, Instance Specific Information Management, Middleware, Benefit Analysis, Remanufacturing