Application of OLAP to a PDM database for interactive performance evaluation of in-progress product development

•Application of OLAP to a PDM database to evaluate in-progress product development performance.•A set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for ongoing product development performance evaluation.•A conceptual multidimensional data model specified by product identifications with associated features.•An implementation of the model using a commercial OLAP engine, and applied a to a prototype PDM system.•Evaluation of in-progress performance which is more flexible than existing result-oriented evaluations.

This paper applies online analytic processing (OLAP), a widely accepted database analysis technique, to a product data management (PDM) database to evaluate the performance of in-progress product development. This paper introduces a set of processing key performance indicators (KPIs) that can measure ongoing product development. To convert and analyze operational data in a PDM database with interactive OLAP operations, this study proposes a multidimensional data model specified by product facts with associated dimensions. The model is implemented using a commercial OLAP engine, and applied to a database supported by a prototype PDM system. The OLAP engine allows analysts to interactively evaluate the performance of in-progress product development in a multidimensional data space. This is a far more flexible and efficient approach than other result-oriented static evaluation approaches.