COMPUTER SUPPORTED PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT THROUGH INTEGRATION OF CAD, RAPID PROTOTYPING AND 3D-DIGITIZING HELPS THE PRODUCTIVITY OF FORMER EAST GERMAN COMPANIES

摘要

In socialistic countries, customer satisfaction and the market conditions were not of high priority: Some selected parts of the market products were of satisfactory costs and quality to customers. Quality and costs of a product decide on its success in the world-wide market. The wishes and expectations of the customer for a high-quality and low-priced product continue to grow, however, with the desire for faster availability of this product. The customer determines also the delivery time and other competitive factors as the durability of the product. At present the trend goes towards shorter product life cycles, which in turn requires reduced time spent on the product development. With these complex market requirements and growing diversity of the products the engineer faces new challenges in his development tasks. It can be paraphrased as follows: In reduced lifecycles a quality-assured and advantageous product has to be developed despite increasing complexity of the design and demands for reduction of material used, manpower and monetary spending.