INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING DESIGN ICED 01 GLASGOW, AUGUST 21-23, 2001 REDUCING DESIGN DEVELOPMENT CYCLE BY DATA MANAGEMENT WITHIN THE DESIGN OFFICE Mario Storga, Davor Pavlic and Dorian Marjanovic Keywords: Product data management, design information management, information representation, web-based systems. 1 Introduction Product development is exposed to increasing demands with respect to quality and costs [1]. Striving to improve and optimise the production process, companies have been increasingly computerizing certain areas of production process. Particularly in the product development process, introduction of the CAD technology has increased efficiency. In the same time, product development process within design office has inherited the traditional methods of product data management. Those traditional methods cause many problems for the companies: effort and money is spent unproductively for data recapturing; development time is extended needlessly; data correctness can not be guaranteed due to the redundant data storage and multiple data conversions between different systems. Such problems have a strong negative effect on company's competitiveness, market share and revenues. Driven by such issues, the need for a software design tools to support representation and engineering information management becomes more critical. This paper is concerned with data management system for design office of small to medium size enterprise with standardized single unit production line. Although presented research is focused on the particular company, the identification of data management problems within design office and implementation methodology are guide general. The support offered to design office from the PDM technology viewpoint is discussed. An efficie nt usage of PDM technology demands knowledge from a number of disciplines such as management, product development, database systems, and information technology. The aim of this research performed in cooperation with the electrical power transformer factory is to develop a framework to integrate those aspects. Product data can no longer be locked into one application or another, but must be reusable down stream, as well as up stream, and by many applications as possible [2]. Reuse introduces a different perspective on the ownership of product data. Product data may not be treated as the responsibility of any particular department within the company. Instead, all product data must be treated as a corporate asset, where different departments should have different view ports on data, and different privileges for its use. The need to compress lead- time requires the introduction of concurrent engineering techniques. All the activities need to use and share the different subsets of the overall product data. This in turn brings the need for an effective Product Data Management system that controls the creation, reuse and retrieval of product data. Such a system can serve as the "backbone" for managing the product lifecycle as shown on Figure 1. PDM manages product data through the enterprise, ensuring