Collaboration planning framework (CPF) to support distributed product development

Current marketplace is undergoing major changes that will affect the way organizations conduct their business. Organizations need to respond to a geographically dispersed marketplace. This can be achieved by leveraging globally distributed resources in order to fully understand and interpret individual customer needs. That is, organizations need to integrate their operations (product development) in a way that will allow dynamic response to market changes. Computer Supported Collaborative Engineering could provide the integrating mechanisms needed to integrate distributed operations. This change to Collaborative Engineering should be done based on sound and comprehensive methodologies that can analyze current practices, assess their ability to be performed collaboratively, restructure organizational practices to enhance their performance in a collaborative environment, select appropriate tools to support practices, and provide an implementation plan.; This research presents a framework that could be used to implement computer supported collaborative product development systems that could operate in a distributed environment. The framework is composed of six modules that provide a systematic procedure to plan for computer supported collaborative engineering. The first module is “Product Development Process Analysis” which analyzes the current product development process and reengineers the process resulting in a process that can migrate to a collaborative environment. The second module is “Organization Analysis” which identifies potential resources that can be used to carry out the development process. The third module is “CSCW Tools Analysis” which investigates existing computer tools that can be used for collaboration among product developers, and classify those tools according to their functionalities. The fourth module is “Resource Assignment” which selects resources capable of carrying out the development process. The fifth module is “Resource Interaction Analysis” which analyzes the interaction needs between resources. The sixth module “CSCW Tools Selection” selects the most appropriate CSCW tool(s) that can carry out the interactions between the resources.