Today, the changes in market requirements and the technological advancements are influencing
the product development process. Customers demand a product of high quality and fast
delivery at a low price, while simultaneously expecting that the product meet their individual
needs and requirements. For companies characterized by a highly customized production, it
is essential to reduce the trial-and-errors cycles to design new products and process. In such
situation most of the company’s knowledge relies on the lessons learnt by operators in years
of work experience, and their ability to reuse this knowledge to face new problems. In order
to develop unique product and complex processes in short time, it is mandatory to reuse
the acquired information in the most efficient way. Several commercial software applications
are already available for product lifecycle management (PLM) and manufacturing execution
system (MES). However, these two applications are scarcely integrated, thus preventing an
efficient and pervasive collection of data and the consequent creation of useful information.
The aim of this paper is to develop a framework able to structure and relate information
from design and execution of processes, especially the ones related to anomalies and critical
situations occurring at the shop floor, in order to reduce the time for finalizing a new product.
The framework has been developed by exploiting open source systems, such as ARAS
PLM and PostgreSQL. A case study has been developed for a car prototyping company to
illustrate the potentiality of the proposed solution.