www.eapstra.org

The official EAPSTRA project closed with the end of the year 2005.
Nevertheless, these forums will stay alive. Please feel free to post
new enquiries or start new discussions.

Dirk Müller
Project Manager

Hello,

The idea of using computers to manage documents in a company seems a very nice ideas. But I am wondering can an SME really afford this as all the big companies charge a lot of money for this software. SMEs can't afford to spend big amounts of money on PDM. So I'd like to ask are there Linux or Open Source PDM tools available that would give an SME the basic features of PDM without paying a lot of money (ideally free).

Thanks

While production planning and control is using trans-sectoral computer integrated tools for their daily work, designers are still working with specialised isolated applications, e. g. CAD, FEM. In quite a lot of enterprises data is stored in internal file systems with the usual problems regarding access control or when looking for a certain information. On the other hand a powerful system called PDM has been developed during the last years, that is capable to serve as backbone and integrating platform for computer integrated product development. Its main focus is to ensure a consistent storage of all data relevant to the development process as well as the co-ordination of the processes to generate such data. The following chapters give a short introduction into the PDM topic.