A hierarchical deployment of distributed product lifecycle management system in collaborative product development

This article proposes a novel methodology of distributed PLM platform deployment. It incorporates information technologies to support collaborative product development in a global enterprise with multiple distributed sites. The requirements of the enterprise are systematically analysed from the organisational, data, content and application views. The corresponding operational guidelines are provided for determining the hardware configuration integrated from the analysis results. A customised deployment plan that reflects the actual user needs is then generated to construct a cost-effective collaborative PLM platform. A case study is included to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methodology in practice.