Harnessing non-structured information and knowledge and know-how capitalisation in integrated engineering: Case study at Aerospatiale Matra

Concurrent Engineering (CE) approaches heavily rely on efficient and reliab le communications among people involved in the design, engineering, industr ialisation and even manufacturing of products. One important aspect of Conc urrent Engineering concerns common resolution of product design problems wi thin a CE integrated team. This involves exchange of technical messages (in formation) and capitalisation of relevant knowledge. The aim in this case i s to keep track of problem solving process and solutions, to learn from exp erience and to avoid making the same mistakes twice. In this paper, an appr oach is proposed and a simple groupware tool working on a network of PC's i s proposed. The tool supports description of technical problems, message ex change among users, monitoring of the problem solving process and documenta tion of technical solutions. It also provides facilities to structure and a rchive knowledge learned during this process. The tool has been developed a nd evaluated at Aerospatiale Matra, especially to feed back to design teams with manufacturing knowledge in the context of product change requests. Fi nally, a method to capitalise knowledge and know-how contents in relation t o the tool is proposed.