Collaborative development of engineered products in a business to
business (B2B) environment requires more than the selection of
components from an on-line catalogue. It involves the electronic
exchange of product, process, and production engineering information
during both design and manufacturing. Although the state of the
practice does include a variety of ways to exchange product data
electronically, it does not extend to the exchange of manufacturing
process data. The reason is simple: process data are usually tied to
specific manufacturing resources. These resources are not known
typically at product development time. This paper proposes an approach
called integrated product and process data, in which manufacturing
process data are considered during product development. This approach
replaces traditional process plans, which are resource specific, with a
resource-independent process representation. Such a representation will
allow a much wider collaboration among business partners and provide
the necessary base for collaborative product development.