A novel approach to collaborative product design and development environment

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to collaborative product design and development environment from a holistic perspective that facilitates virtual multidisciplinary activities. The approach accomplishes integration of a distributed collaborative product development strategy and user-centred environment. It embraces product development representation, a novel systematic framework to manage a collaborative product development (CPD) system, and a novel human-centred system. The advantage of the developed system is that it encompasses a marketing information system (MIS), a human resources management (HRM) system, a supply chain management (SCM) system, communication media, an integrated product design studio, user-centred interfaces, and databases. The developed system has been tested, with results showing major benefits such as reduced product development lead time and cost. The tangible benefit of implementing this system is that the complex product developing process is organized in a systematic, consistent, and concurrent manner to enable collaboration among team members throughout the development process. It accomplishes a guiding sequence that assists inexperienced users to follow the complex process. Therefore, an efficient product development process is generated. One of the advantageous features of this system is that the barriers between people and incompatible computer systems, resulting from non-standardization, have been eliminated.