The Enterprise-Web portal for life-cycle support

As we enter the new millennium, the approach to product development is evolving rapidly. Companies are in the process of creating a distributed design and manufacturing environment that enables integrated product, processes, and protocols development (IP3D). Certain strategies and some specific technologies are required to create such an environment. One such strategy is finding effective methods for communication and sharing of information, especially those related to design and manufacturing, throughout the entire enterprise and the supply chain. The technologies that support such a strategy must be able to deal with distributed environments and databases, must ensure reliability and security, and must be practical. Therefore, to accomplish this task efficiently, we need a roadmap that spells out the communication infrastructure (with a practical access interface) and defines the administration and management methodology. We suggest here that electronic access to design and manufacturing information within the extended enterprise must be Web-based because of its universal interface, open standards, ease of use, and ubiquity. To effectively deal with the distributed data, we recommend combining the distributed object standards (e.g. CORBA/DCOM) with the Web standards and protocols (e.g. Java, XML, IIOP) to create the Object Web. Finally, we propose that the Object Web must be combined with an enterprise's information authoring and management systems (e.g. CAD, PDM, ERP) to create the Enterprise-Web (E-Web) portal, with the mission of providing the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right format anywhere within the extended enterprise. In this paper we identify a majority of the components needed to implement the E-Web and provide user scenarios (based on actual working prototypes) to demonstrate the effectiveness of such a system. Using the scenarios and the prototypes, we will show how E-Web can provide support for everyone associated with a product during its life cycle, thus creating a true IP3D environment. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.