Abstract

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems are used by thousands of engineering companies world wide. Improving these systems will have a drastic and global effect. One possible improvement is to integrate synchronous collaborative applications with PLM systems. These applications allow multiple people to work on a single digital object simultaneously. They have already been shown to reduce the time a task requires. Using these applications to complete a project will reduce the project time. However, simply including synchronous collaborative applications within a PLM system ignores powerful benefits that could provide further time-saving benefits. The integration must allow improved awareness at the project level, so that users can mediate their own actions.This thesis presents a method for such an integration. It also presents a prototype which implements that method. Testing was carried out using this prototype. As hypothesized, including synchronous collaborative applications shortened the overall project time. In addition, providing awareness information and allowing users to mediate themselves further shortened project times and reduced variation in those times. Proper integration should therefore provide awareness at the project level and allow users to mediate themselves to some extent.

Degree

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology; Mechanical Engineering

Rights

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