Selecting Future Development Partners Through Monitoring of Existing Collaborations

Cross-company collaboration in product development is currently faced with major challenges because of varieties of reasons. Companies depend on acquiring the know-how for innovative future products from outside the company while the support is not limited on the product development but rather on continuous collaboration over product life cycle and consequently are planned for long term normally. These development partners have to get an early and deep read into product and process design of the company for a goal-oriented cooperation. Despite these far-reaching knowledge of the development partner about the own company, the selection of a development partners is still founded on subjective criteria or random acquaintances yet. This approach uses data from ERP systems for the business view and of PDM systems representing the technical view for the monitoring of current cooperation and development partners. It becomes possible to monitor actual collaborations continuously and targeted for their suitability and also serves to gather and analyze information in order to select suitable development partners.Copyright © 2012 by ASME