A Document Management tool for Traceability information in Product Lifecycle Management

In the actual industrial scenario, characterized by an ever increasing demand of innovation in short times, with high integration of design and production phases it has become important the possibility of a fast and efficient product development with an effective information retrieval and possibility to reconstruct the design history of a product to speeder develop a new one or improve those on the market In the present paper we propose a Document Management tool to integrate in a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform all the traceability information related to the design and production processes of an industrial product. When talk about Document Management we often deal about information traceability, whether the information type is structured or not. In this paper we intend to front this issue focusing not only on information traceability used in a document management solution, but also on certain traceability features allowed by design tools. Traceability in Document Management must allows to know, for each element managed, not only the document content at each consultation time, but also its history, i.e. the list of everyone who has contributed to data formation, with the evidence of he who has modified each information, when and why, with clear indications about the content before and after each modification intervention. With this aim we have developed a tool for information traceability embedded in a PLM platform. In particular, starting from an open source software, we have developed a traceability tool for information management able to follow all product developed, until production launch, providing all history information. The prototype developed has been tested in a firm producing industrial refrigerators where the system has been tested during the development of a new type of refrigerating unit.