Engineering information management

Engineering information management (EIM) is the business function within product development and specifically systems engineering that allows engineers to collaborate on a single source of truth of engineering data.

Contrary to product data management (PDM) and product lifecycle management (PLM), its main purpose is not storage of CAD-related drawings and files, but rather the full execution of the V-model for hardware development, complementing and integrating to the above mentioned systems.

Scope

EIM systems enable collaboration on all important aspects of the engineering lifecycle, such as:

• Requirements management
• Functional design
• Product architecture
• Detailed systems design and simulation
• Verification and validation
• Documentation

EIM systems implement the activities on both sides of the engineering V-model. Instead of being purely a data storage, it focuses also on the human interaction with the models and data,^[1] thus enabling concurrent engineering.^[2]

EIM therefore enables the optimization of products and engineering processes, where traditional methodologies have become ineffective in keeping up with rising product and process complexity.^[3]

Interactions with the other engineering management systems

EIM systems do directly and indirectly interact with other tools in the engineering information infrastructure, such as:

• Computer simulation tools
• Automated hardware testing tools
• Product lifecycle and product data management systems^[4]
• Enterprise resource planning tools
• Manufacturing execution systems
• Computer-aided design (MCAD) and electronic design automation (ECAD) tools

 

Engineering information management system interactions with other systems

References

1. Azam, Farooque; Li, Zhang; Ahmad, Rashid (2007). "Integrating value-based requirement engineering models to webml using vip business modeling framework". Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. pp. 933–942. doi:10.1145/1242572.1242698. ISBN 9781595936547. S2CID 1070235.
2. Stark, John (1992). Engineering information management systems : beyond CAD/CAM, to concurrent engineering support. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. ISBN 0-442-01075-3. OCLC 24628890.
3. Rangan, Ravi M.; Chadha, Bipin (2001-03-01). "Engineering Information Management to Support Enterprise Business Processes". Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering. 1 (1): 32–40. doi:10.1115/1.1353845. ISSN 1530-9827.
4. "How PLM/PDM manage half of Engineers' data and how EIM complents the other 50%. – EIM". engineering-information-management.com. Retrieved 2022-03-17.