Product Data Management

The Product Development life cycle consists of product specification, product design, manufacturing plan development and manufacturing. Each of these stages involves several activities performed by different people within or outside an organization.

Product Specification

The purpose of specification is to create a standard datasheet for the product. The datasheet can be viewed as a contract between the product consumers and product developers. When a product is actually designed, it has to be ensured that the product design conforms to the datasheet.

Product Design

The purpose of design is to create a functional prototype, a bill of materials document and detailed drawings that can be used for actually manufacturing the product. Electronic products will often include ROM images containing software images (firmware) for the product.

Manufacturing Plan

A manufacturing plan is a document that gives detailed instruction on the exact steps to be followed for manufacturing a product. In addition the plan should outline the detailed quality assurance steps to be followed, various tests to be conducted and results to be recorded.

Manufacturing and Quality Assurance

A product manufacturing plan is followed to actually manufacture a product. The bill of materials is used to ensure the required raw material are available. The quality assurance plan is used to ensure that the finished products meet the product specification as outlined in the datasheet. An audit trail is created by collecting the results from various tests conducted on either each manufactured item or on random samples taken from each batch.

The Need For Manufacturing Product Data Management

It is clear that several documents are created and used across the product development process. Ensuring that such documentation is readily available at every stage, updates to the docuemntation are instantly used is critical to the success of a quality conscious manufacturing organization. Often manufacturing documents are highly sensitive and must be accessed in a secure manner.

A Good Solution

A good product data management solution will have the following attributes:

• Ability to maintain a product catalogue.
• Ability to define a set of documents that will have to be maintained for each product.
• Ability to attach different kinds of documents (manufacturing plan, drawings, datasheets, test instructions) for each product.
• Ability to submit documents for review and only deploy those documents that pass the review process. Document control is an important aspect of quality managements systems like ISO 9000.
• Ability to save batch-wise test reports.

Products and Services Offered

Sankhya offers web 2.0 applications that can be used to automate the entire range of activities required for managing product documents. Services are offered for training and creating custom solutions.

Next Steps

Contact Us to request a proposal.