An investigation on a prototype customer-oriented information system for product concept development

In a competitive and globalised business environment, a company can never out-perforin its competitors, if it depends solely on its products alone. As a result, customer needs become an important factor to, consider in new product development. In this work, a customer-oriented information system (COIS) was investigated and employed to establish a closer link between product re-innovation and customer involvement in the context of product concept development. It is aimed at improving design efficiency through managing multilevel product information, and reducing time and cost. In order to expedite the implementation of such an information system, a so-called functional attributes hierarchy (FAH) was proposed and developed to elicit product concepts and relevant design specifications from both generic and specific viewpoints. The correlation between them in terms of individual customer requirements was also identified with the utilisation of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique. In addition, an object-oriented technique that enables information stored in a relational database (RDB) to be accessed was developed. The development is aimed at eliminating the semantic gaps between the data model and engineering designs. A case study on wood golf club design was carried out to validate the bespoke COIS for product concept development. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.