Requirements and strategies for the retention of automotive product data

This paper discusses the requirements for the retention of automotive product data, the: strategies being used to meet the requirements and issues related to these requirements and strategies. For purposes of this paper, data retention refers to the automotive product data that must be kept or retained by the organization for more than one-year after it is completed. Product data must typically be kept for much longer time periods. Automotive product data refers to the Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM), Computer Aided Engineering (CAE), Product Data Management (PDM) and Service data used to support Product Design, Engineering, Manufacturing, Customer Service, Corporate Counsel and Governmental Regulation needs. This paper proposes a minimal set of automotive product data which needs to be retained, recommends retention periods for the different types of data being retained, and concludes with a survey of strategies currently being used in the automotive industry for product data retention. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.