Excessive market competition, mass customization, growing product complexity is forcing enterprises to look for new initiatives. To take the lead in new product development, mergers and joint ventures are a common strategy. As the companies do not possess all the knowledge with in, they need to instead rely on other organizations, the result is, need of distance product development, which in turn requires huge efforts for collaborative product development, especially in case of aerospace and automotive. In this paper we investigate into the collaborative product development for complex products like aero plane in an extended enterprise and also examine product design approaches being adopted by leading giants ofthe industry. There are claims ofhigh gains by those who have adopted the systems(i. e. PLM solutions) that helped collaboration. We propose PLM based framework to enable collaborative product development. In this paper we also introduce a brief concept of design flow process activities for collaborative development.

Growing product complexity, large number of product variants and collaborative product development have made Product Data Management (PDM) increasingly important for aerospace manufacturing companies. Modern product data management systems, enable enterprise, shortening development lifecycles by preserving and reusing its intellectual capital, taking advantage of new technologies like J2EE and XML. As a result PDM systems have expanded their functionality to become PLM (product lifecycle management) solutions. Automotive and Aerospace, the experts say, are the PLM bellwethers for the rest of manufacturing. Realizing that PLM/PDM systems are complex to implement we undertook a sample implementation to deepen our understanding of product data management in PLM environment. We used Teamcenter enterprise from EDS, to create PLM environment and instantiate our work, which involved an aero plane assembly. The paper describes, fundamentals of product data management, and related processes with instantiated examples. At the end, UML has been used to encapsulate workflow based collaborative design approach for described work.