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 reliable communications among people involved in the design, engineering, industrialisation and even manufacturing of products. One important aspect of Concurrent Engineering concerns common resolution of product design problems within a CE integrated team. This involves exchange of technical messages (information) and capitalisation of relevant knowledge. The aim in this case is to keep track of problem solving process and solutions, to learn from ex perience and to avoid making the same mistakes twice. In this paper, an approach is proposed and a simple groupware tool working on a network of PC's is proposed. The tool supports description of technical problems, message exchange among users, monitoring of the problem solving process and documentation of technical solutions. It also provides facilities to structure and archive knowledge learned during this process. The tool has been developed and evaluated at Aerospatiale Matra, especially to feed back to design teams with manufacturing knowledge in the context of product change requests. Finally, a method to capitalise knowledge and know-how contents in relation to the tool is proposed.