Evaluation of Task Pattern Use in Web-based Collaborative Engineering

Starting from two industrial collaborative engineering cases, the paper introduces the concept of task patterns for support of fast and flexible product design in networked manufacturing enterprises. Task patterns are reusable models of enterprise knowledge capturing best practices for typical collaboratively performed design tasks. Furthermore, the main elements of a Web-based collaboration infrastructure are presented, which provides an execution environment for task patterns and other services for support of collaborative work. In order to evaluate the effects of task pattern use in collaborative engineering, a balanced scorecard approach was used. Task patterns did not only proved adequate and useful for the collaborative engineering cases, but also led to a number of positive trends reflected by economic indicators. The time and costs for meetings was significantly reduced, there is reason to believe that lead times can be shortened, and the quality of best practices in general seems to improve when replacing conventional documentations with active knowledge models.