The creation of new industrial products is done in two phases: conceptual design and detailed design. The conceptual design phases carries most of the innovation, and it is on it that most of the company future performance depends.

ArtForge is the ideal tool to manage this conceptual design phase, that involves multidisciplinary teams who aim at defining as fast as possible the best trade-offs between all the final products aspects: design, functionality, cost, performance, quality, …etc.

At the beginning, the team starts with customer or market requirements. Then it will either reuse existing components, sub-contract or create new ones, that will go through several stages :

• modeling
• analysis / simulation
• manufacturing / tooling
• costs

These components will then be assembled in products, which will also follow various phases :

• assembly
• analysis / simulation
• kinematics simulation and clash detection
• tooling
• costs
• tests

The final product is the result of numerous iterations between all the actors, many exchanges being necessary to reach the best possible product. For example, a manufacturing optimization can require a modification in the initial design, that can itself cause other modifications downstream. But these iterations are not all predictable, and do not fit in predefined workflows.

Hence the problem is to manage this collaborative work in a both efficient and flexible way.

Classical PLM tools are focused on the management of CAD data, and often tied to one specific software vendor, which makes it difficult to collaborate across all product organizations.

In addition, one needs a project management tool, but most of them are not very flexible and complex to use. In the end, project view and product view have to be reconciled to make it easier to choose trade offs.

The ArtForge software suite is the answer to this problem, thanks to its unique way of integrating product and project management.