An organization's ICME implementaton strategy will depend on a number of factors including the nature of their product, location within the supply chain, size and scope of the engineering staff, computatonal infrastructure, etc. However, during a recent ICME development program, we learned that two critical considerations were necessary for acceptance of ICME i.) a detailed understanding of the information and format required by the design engineering customer and ii.) sufficient model and tool validation to build credibility among design engineers. The first of these items is more difficult than usually recognized; but the payoff is significant since ICME acceptance depends critically on giving the customer what he wants and needs. I expect that the same holds whether the customer is a design engineer, a production manager, an external customer etc.
