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research is not focused on the support for the special
characteristics of networked NPD, we did not
discuss VE research in this paper.
7 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
There is increasing demand to extend business
process automation also to project-based business
processes like new product development (NPD).
This drives the integration of product data
management (PDM) systems located in different
companies. On the basis of a set of semi-structured
interviews and the experiences gained on
constructing a prototype of PDM system integration,
we argued that there is a unique phase in the B2B
integration implementation process in the context of
NPD. We motivated this by describing the
engineering change request business process, which
is typical to NPD, and showing how this business
process would be automated in a typical B2B
integration architecture. Then, we showed what parts
of the B2B integration supporting the business
process automation would require further work upon
the initiation of new NPD projects.
We suggest that taking this project-level B2B
integration work into account when planning B2B
integrations for NPD context would be useful, as
otherwise there is risk that the B2B integration
would not fully support the project-oriented nature
of NPD. The lack of support for the project-level
B2B integration work could lead to unnecessarily
small breadth and scope for the B2B integrations,
with would cause unnecessary manual work.
It would be useful to target more research on
integration of project-based processes to propose
solutions to handle these differences. The different
project-specific aspects should be identified better so
that the B2B integrations would be agile to the
changes needed in different projects. As this project
specificity is not necessarily only NPD related
concept, it would be good to gain more experiences
in other business process automations that are
organised in projects.
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SUPPORTING NETWORKED PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT WITH BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS INTEGRATION -
Recognizing a New Phase in the Integration Implementation
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