Product Development

In the last decade, many factors have changed in the enterprise-environment due to the diversification of the market demand. Enterprises react to the changing situation by offering an increasing number of variants of existing products. A proven valuable attempt is not to deal with short-term measures like designing very customized modules, but to consider the eventual customer requirements already in the first stages of the engineering design process. More- over the engineering design process have to be supported by adaquate IT-tools, in order to manage the data during the development process as well as later during the product life-cycle. This approach can be realised with the Digital Product. This contribution presents the Digital Product and shows the prerequirement of the Digital Product to be fulfiled in the context of the sales process and the product configuration.

Collaborative engineering communities are one way for an internet-based-support for various actors working on a single engineering task. E-Cluster can serve as an organisational form for collaborative engineering communities. Both, member and intermediaries are highly committed to an E-Cluster. This paper examines chances and risks for a combination of collaborative engineering communities and E-Cluster. Investigations based on personnel, finance, trust, organisation, and technology issues support the proposition that E-Cluster can be used as a form of organisation for collaborative engineering communities.

This article describes modern product configurators in the area of high variant and complex products. Next to being a tool for external sales force, product configurators are introduced as a modern e-commerce medium for product presentation on the internet. Their relevance as a back office interface between CRM and ERP systems is illustrated.

In a highly competitive environment characterized by decreasing life cycles, lower profit margins and a stronger individualization of products enterprises are forced to adopt new strategies to stand the challenges of the market. The article describes the framework of an integrated complexity management including methods, models and information technology for the identification, the control, the reduction and the prevention of activities without any productivity in direct and indirect sectors of the supply chain.

Product configuration systems are a key to efficient and customer-oriented sales processes for technical components and parts. A common model for product information and rules extended by a simple model of a decision tree simplifies the management of system data.

Today, in many industries the customer demands on products and services change rapidly. Most customers expect individualized products at simultaneously low costs and delivery times. Therefore, many enterprises attempt the strategy of Mass Customization (MC). The result is a variant-rich production process which causes complex prerequisites for the enterprises. This contribution shows an infrastructure for the transfer of customer specifications in the MC.

During the last years, marketing of products via the Internet became more and more important for both customers and manufacturers. However, most products sold today cannot be customised to satisfy the buyer’s individual requirements. Configuration functionality incorporated in current ERP systems as well as industrial product development software addresses the problem of fully automated design of products according to specification. However such extensive functionality is difficult to implement, requires extensive resources to run and a large part of its costly features offers no added value in an e-commerce context. E-commerce and the Internet in general pose a number of specific requirements as e.g. lightweight simple design, good scalability, interactivity, user friendliness etc. In order to meet these demands, a new method of configuration has been developed. This method focuses on non-automatic, interactive, user-friendly configuration of product variants based on a simple yet ...

Innovative companies are embracing innovative variant planning as a new management method for individual production. This method allows companies to create greater product variety and more individually customized goods and services at competitive prices. To fulfil these requirements, the gap between specific customer product requirements and the production requirements of standardized processes has to be bridged. This article describes experiences on organizational transformation from individual manufacturing to mass customization both from product and from process point of view. It shows managers how to proceed in a step-oriented manner.

Although accounting for approximately 50 percent of the development costs, measures to ensure product attributes (PA) again and again fail in their implementation. This happens because there is no betimes overview of the final product. Another reason is an insufficient coordination of validation measures. This article presents an approach for an effective and efficient validation process to ensure product attributes. The approach is based on experiences from various projects.

Profilerating product complexity has numerous reasons and consequences for the whole enterprise. Often these are unknown. The management of product complexity addresses neither the unifold maximization nor the minimization of product diversity. Managing product complexity, i. e. product range, product sequence and product assembly, means to achieve an optimum where high cus-tomer value can be reached whilst maintaining comparatively low cost of production. The VMEA method (Variant Mode and Effects Analysis) is designed and proven for the optimization of both the product assembly and the product functions. It facilitates a systematic and consequent approach to managing product complexity. Thus product complexity can be used as strategic success position and competitive advantage.