A Product Data Manager supporting a new co-design methodology for SMEs

Today SMEs are often required to provide fast answer to customer's request for products tailored with its individual requirements: in consequence it is then quite common that SMEs working in the same industrial sector are oriented to co-operate with each other in order to reach a market objective that is out of reach of a single enterprise, and that can be achieved better from a consortium of enterprises. Often the co-operation is a real collaboration among the companies in the design of the new product. This paper describes a product data manager supporting the definition and the negotiation of the product data within a co-design network of SMEs: the described tool is part of the results of Esprit Project 25360 COWORK (COncurrent project development IT tools for small medium enterprises netWORKs).