An Approach To Management Of Product Technology: The IT Perspective

Recently, the development of China economy is compelling. However, the Chinese products impress foreigners with low price, bad quality and low-level technology. In order to change this situation, our country has been taking lots of efforts in publicly, policy, science devotion and talents training. But the competitive and impression of domestic products have never been changed yet. Towards this, people from different fields have different opinions, while they ignore the reason that our technology management is far more behind the world top company. The structure and manufacturing process of large and medium sized product is complex, so these are numerous factors which affect quality and numerous reasons which induce the quality trouble. If we suppose one piece of technology to be a means to solve the quality trouble, then a company must have thousands of technology each of which is indispensable. Because where there is absent technology, there will be a hidden problem. So, in order to change the draggle situation, we have to obtain the key technology, manage the owned technology and use the needed technology indispensably.Lots of examples show that there is certain distance between domestic products and the world advanced products is not because we are lack of advanced design or manufacturing technology but rest on we do not know how to organize the owned technology systematically then apply to product design, develop and manufacturing process. This problem reflects the development of domestic manufacture and the product competitive are badly restricted by the lag of our technology management status. Thus, based on the research of numerical control lathe which is representative in manufacturing, this paper, objected on product technology, researches on MOT (management of technology) problem of how to manage and use numerous technology in manufacturing.In order to solve the above problem, understand the meaning of technology is the first thing. Scholars from different subjects have different opinions about technology which they get from different perspective. So, we turn to discuss the meaning of product technology instead of technology. And there are still similarities in the various opinion, that are technology is a system, technology faces to application, it can not isolate from environment, and the definition or description of technology must be multi- dimensional. These similarities give us good inspiration in defining the concept and scope of product technology. In this thesis, product technology is oriented by product and objected by quality in the product whole life circle, it is the system of all implemental measures, which includes product design technology, manufacture technology, quality guarantee technology, scale technology, reliability technology, failure maintain technology et al., Product technology exists in the form of knowledge, skill and operational means, and man is the real carrier. But if it's only carried by man, it is impossible for manufacturer to manage the technology and deliver high quality product, so it's better to describe the technology in text form. However, some of them could only be shown in object, and some know-how can not be described by text or object. So translate all the technology in absolute electronic way is unrealistic. On the other hand, it needs to use IT technology to support technology management, and rather that there are countless affiliation among technology, so we have to find other resolution.A multidimensional data model which is used to figure the character of product technology and a technology management framework are proposed in this paper. Every dimension presents an attribute of product technology in the data model. The granularity is defined by WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) and FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis).The data model not only presents the character information but also describes the structure of technology. Technology management framework is consists of technology base subsystem and technology application subsystem. Then we choose RDF (Resource Description Framework) to transform the data model to computer model, and describe it with RDF/XML, which is easy to be understood, handled, and has powerful description and platform-cross ability. And it helps to store the character information of product technology in database (Rational Database, Object Database, Native XML Database).The main contribute of this thesis is: towards the problem of managing and using much technology in a good way to improve the product competitive, we propose a product technology management scheme which could be implemented in IT technology platform.