Requirements for Concurrent Engineering Environments
Corresponding Author: Aarni, Ville
Author(s): Aarni, V., and Hannus, Matti
Organisation(s): VTT Building Technology (Finland)
Document / product data management (DM/PDM) are currently being deployed by e.g. aerospace, automotive, mechanical and process plant industries. Hardly any use exists in the building construction industries. 

It is anticipated that in near future most LSE companies will have in-house DM/PDM systems. In construction industry companies are likely to deploy DM systems which are closely coupled with their CAE tools. 

The main integration problem with DM/PDM will be to connect different company specific systems in LSE projects. Most companies including CONCUR partners do not yet have in-house systems in place today. Therefore we need to consider a migration strategy enabling companies to set up DM/PDM while preserving connectibility with future external systems.

The main requirements for the Concurrent Engineering Environments are:
-Manage published project information
  --Version/revision management
  --Maturity management (~EnoviaVPM)
  --Redlining
  --Change history
-Make distributed project information available to all participants
-Maintain log for:
  --Check in / check out 
  --all transactions and changes
-Support informal & formal processes
-Ability to connect different kinds of company specific working environments
-User specific breakdown structure (views)
-Product structure navigation

The system should also:
-Manage access rights
-Be quick and easy to setup for new projects
-Automaticly pre- and postprocess data according to user profile (zip/unzip, encrypting, format conversion, push, etc.)
-Manage workflow 
-Support groupwork
-Manage Product Data 
-Act as Distributed Database