Globalized OEM and Tier-1 Processes at SKF

Abstract

Concurrent engineering in distributed development environments like those characteristic of the automotive industry place enormous demands on the organization of collaboration between the companies and departments involved. Efficient data communication in all phases of the product development process is a prerequisite for lean and flexible collaboration processes. Automotive suppliers that develop system components for a number of different OEMs or tier-1 suppliers face the challenge of ensuring that they make the CAD data available in the format required by their customers and with a high level of reliability and, if data translation is involved, that they take the system configuration of the respective customer into consideration. One possible approach to reducing the amount of time and effort involved and achieving a higher level of data communication reliability is outsourcing data translation and data exchange to an experienced service provider. This article describes use case of the Automotive Market at SKF: the data communication requirements of a global automotive supplier implemented with the web-based exchange service provided by PROSTEP AG.