Abstract
Owing to the rapid changes of market demand and world-wide competition, the life cycles of products are getting shorter. On the other hand, the complexity and cost of product development are getting higher. In order to shorten the product life-cycle, the concept of concurrent engineering(CE) have been widely adopted by many enterprises. However there exist many problems when transferring from traditional sequential engineering(SE) to CE. These problems include the re-organization of system architecture and the re-design of information flows. In order to solve these problems, it is important to develop a systematic method to ensure the success of re-engineering processes. Basing on the idea of business process re-engineering(BPR), this research intends to incorporate the methodology of enterprise modeling into the life cycle of product development. By modeling the development processes from different viewpoints, the product development can be more efficient. To investigate the effectiveness of the developed approach, the product development processes of automobile manufacturing was selected for system verification because of the high complexity involved in. The reference models of product development processes for automobile manufacturing have also been conducted by using ARIS-Toolset, a powerful enterprise modeling tool. By this integrated approach, the product development processes can be progressed in a more rapid and systematic manner.