Abstract
Designing a new product requires information from the business and physical domains, which implies integrating business decision tools with process and material simulation processes to form an overall workflow. The integration involves coupling the business workflow management systems with analysis tools, optimisation and decision support systems, which require process simulations and an integrated data transfer service. The process simulation, in turn, will in general model multiple layers of time scales and thus is also in need of data transfer between different solvers. Here we discuss the main components in the light of a coating-design project.