A support environment of non-real-time distributed collaboration for product development and its future subject

Manufacturing industries in Japan are recently exposed to a severe competition, global mega competition. In such a situation, it is indispensable for manufacturing industries to encourage global cooperation, to cope with changes quickly and flexibly and to create knowledge and increase product value. By means of an information management system, called "FlexPIM", we proposed a new concept of information management and a new IT system. This system intends to provide us a non-real-time distributed collaboration based on the "shared-room-metaphor". We employed this system practically, and evaluated the function to urge knowledge creation.