Knowledge-based assessment of manufacturing process performance: integration of product lifecycle management and value-chain simulation approaches

Regarding the market globalisation, manufacturers have to improve the performance and efficiency of their production plants. To fulfil this goal, managers need methods and tools to assess their product development and their production engineering processes by assessing the performance and the value of the specified technical solutions. This article presents a new approach to support this assessment of manufacturing enterprise processes in terms of performance and value indicators based on knowledge management (KM) integration. Based on the principles of value chain, in one hand, and on methods of KM, on the other hand, the aim of the proposal is to help experts to make relevant decisions on product development and/or production process planning. The approach originality is to use of product lifecycle management (PLM) capabilities to achieve semi-automated capitalisation of heterogeneous knowledge from various enterprise information systems. Capitalised knowledge is then used as an input of the assessment module. This module implements a set of simulation algorithms for the assessment and evaluation of different alternatives of value chains according to required performance criteria.