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In any product development process, team collaboration is a key to success. Especially, multidisciplinary and global teamwork is vital in finding a comprehensive solution in product development. But inherent gaps between the participating disciplines and cultures cause disputes and misunderstandings when collaborating. This paper shows the challenges in interdisciplinary and intercultural teamwork, which have to be overcome in order to advance an integrated product development process. The purpose of this research is to improve mutual accommodation in multidisciplinary and international teamwork with the support of modern information technology and technical product documentation.

Processes are very important for the success within many business fields. They define the proper application of methods, technologies, tools, and company structures in order to reach business goals. Not only manufacturing processes have to be defined from the start point to their end, also other processes like product development processes need a proper description to gain success. For example in automotive industries complex product development processes are necessary and defined prior to product development. Over the last decades several product modeling languages have been developed moving to object oriented modeling languages, such as UML, but the used process modeling languages are still procedural. The paradigm shift caused by object oriented description within product modeling languages has to be transferred to process modeling languages. This paper describes an object oriented approach for process modeling, referred to as PML and its application to a complex product development and production process for integrated sheet metal design of higher order bifurcations. Using UML as a starting point an object oriented process modeling method is differentiated. The basic concepts which are needed for process modeling are put into an object oriented context and are explained. The paper gives an outlook, what can be achieved by the new approach.

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