Many companies base their business strategy on customized products with a high level of variety and continuous functional improvements. For companies to be able to provide affordable products in a short time and be at the competitive edge, every new design must be adapted to existing production facilities. In order to ensure this, collaboration between engineering design and production engineering has to be supported. With the dispersed organisations of today combined with the increasing amount of information that has to be shared and managed, this collaboration is a critical issue for many companies.

In this article, an approach for sharing and managing product and production information is introduced. The results are based on the experiences from a case study at a car manufacturer. By ontology-based integration, work within domains engineering design, production engineering and requirement management at the company was integrated. The main objectives with the integration were: support the formation of requirement specifications for products and processes, improve and simplify the information retrieval for designers and process planners, ensure traceability from changes in product systems to manufacturing systems and vice versa, and finally, eliminate redundant or multiple versions of requirement specifications.