Collaborative Product Development - A Groupware System Based on Service Oriented Architecture The Romanian Review Precision Mechanics, Optics & Mechatronics, 2010 (20), No. 37 111 COLLABORATIVE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT - A GROUPWARE SYSTEM BASED ON SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE Daniel do N. Melo 1 , Leonilde Varela 2 , S. Carmo-Silva 2 1 Amazonian CERTI Institute, Brazil, 2 Department of Production and Systems, University of Minho, Portugal Abstract - Product Development (PD) can be enhanced through web-based collaboration of working teams. This collaboration enables professionals to work simultaneously on a same project, e.g. the development of a new product. Collaborative PD requires networking resources, and applications needed by collaborating teams in the design and management of product development projects. Using this collaborative approach to PD can bring benefits on cost and speed of development, and also on ideas, all important factors contributing for increased competitiveness of companies and industrial regions worldwide. This is an important objective of the Industrial District of Manaus, Brazil, where the results of the research work reported in this paper are intended to be firstly applied. This work explores two dimensions of the web based PD problem, namely the PD collaboration platform and the PD tasks and information management dimensions. An investigation was carried out into groupware applications and technology and also into tools for managing product development projects. This led to the proposal of a model of a collaborative system for new product development based on both the Service Oriented Architecture and the SCRUM project management framework. This paper describes the specification of software and hardware requirements for the proposed model and the collaborative tools to be used. Keywords – collaborative Product Development, web-based collaboration 1. Introduction Product development can benefit from internet based collaborative environments. These favour interaction between PD stakeholders worldwide and ideas generation. Such environment can also enhance the product development cycle and achieve levels of speed and quality of product innovation never possible before. Having into account that product innovation is nowadays probably the major factor of success of companies, investment on the development of suitable collaborative environments for improving new product development process and shortening its cycle is bound to be worthwhile. This work gives a contribution to this area. It proposes a groupware model for a collaborative product development (CPD) system, base on web services and the SCRUM project management tool and methodology [1]. The aims are to help to structure, improve and speed up the whole PD process, from start to end, in the sector of electronics consumer goods and related software. For this, in addition to the communication enhancement, web services and updated information on every PD task or version can be made readily available and accessible to PD stakeholders by this CPD system. The CPD is based on a PD management structure organized into five phases. These are borrowed from PMBOK [2] published by the Project Management Institute, which describes the nature of the processes of project management in terms of integration between processes, the interactions within them and the objectives they serve. These processes are aggregated into five groups, defined as groups of processes of project management: 1) Initiation processes; 2) Planning processes; 3) Process implementation; 4) Process monitoring and control; and 5) Closing Process. Thus, the groupware model of the CPD system includes functionalities that follow these process groups of the PD cycle. In addition to this introduction the paper is organized as follows: First a simplified view of the framework for collaborative work through the web is presented. Then the nature and kind of components for constructing the web based CPD system are described. Before the conclusion we present first a simple view of the system architecture and then a brief description its functional features. The conclusion puts in perspective objectives, achievements and the intended use of the CPD system in the Industrial Manaus District (PIM) of Brazil, and refers the planned near future work 2. The web approach to collaborative work The term groupware was introduced in 1978