Please help,

Our company used a "Product Development Management System" that was meant for a really big company. This PDMS does not match with our company because we are very small. Does anyone out there have a sample of the PDMS that is not so complicated?

Thank you,

Khanh

Unfortunately, I don't have any examples for you. Is it not possible for you to adapt what you have to your business model? I expect that even if you get a "small company" example, you'll still have to adapt it to your business.

As a former US President used to say (perhaps he still does) "I feel your pain!"

The problem of a public forum such as the Cove is that the readers/users come from a variety of situations and we may have different views and insights into what PDMS is "user friendly" and what isn't.

However, if you are able to disclose more detail about your specific situation, we may be able to focus on solutions which will fit YOUR situation.

For example:

do you develop many different products per year (more than one per week?)
are the products complicated? requiring custom components from multiple suppliers?
do you design and develop the products from scratch in-house? or do you develop products to order based on customer requirements?
do you have budget constraints?
are your products highly technical, requiring trained engineers or other professionals to validate and ensure end-user safety?
why is software necessary? what did you do to develop products BEFORE software?I can think of numerous other questions, but we are not here to play 20 questions to drag the information out of you - you have to make some effort to put us "in the picture" so we can make focused comments and suggestions.

Wes asked several good questions, but I think the best one of all is this:

<snip>why is software necessary?
Please don't take offense at this question. Does anyone in your organization know anything about project management? Human nature sometimes causes us to try to substitute software for knowledge, and it often gets us into trouble.

If you apply project management principles, you should be able to cobble your own system together using simple project management tools. You might even be able to do it without software, unless you are talking about some kind of version control software for drawings, source code, etc.

But do tell us more.

Irrespective of the size, i feel PDMS is effective if you are introducing new products every month.

I sincerly feel that Designers should also have some targets. As the market decides the price, reverse engineering should be one at the stage of design itself. for this, PDMS is quite effective.

Please bear with me for a few days and i will give you a sample sheet for a molded component.