The information management is an important factor for competing with other companies and manufacturing companies also face to see an explosion in the amount of the information they generate, exchange and store. Concurrent Engineering has been recognized as a strategy for the successful product development process in the competitive global environment. Product Data Management(PDM) system’s implementation is the essential technology for the realization of Concurrent Engineering concept. Especially the workflow management system supported by PDM is a key issue in complex and large business process.
This paper suggests the methodology of a workflow system construction which focuses on the product development process. The whole procedure of the workflow system construction consists of AS-IS process modeling through an interview with the engineers, TO-BE process modeling with Business Process Reengineering and workflow modeling. After the product development process being analyzed, this paper suggests three levels of methodology for workflow modeling - simple notation, workflow type of joining the simple notations and standard document life-cycle. Conjunction, disconjunction, and some extended rules considering task start-time were also defined for the branch and combination conditions of a workflow.
This research has shown that the workflow of product development process could be constructed from the combination of proposed workflow types based on the defined operator.