Trends and Research Issues in Customer-Oriented Product Conceptualization

With the increasing impact of global manufacturing, enterprises now must be able to adapt to the intensified collaboration among different parties that are involved in design, manufacturing and support services. Such collaboration is deemed critical for the timely realization and distribution of cost-effective and reliable products in the global market. In this respect, manufacturing enterprises now need to go beyond conventional practices to novel integrated activities encompassing product design and development, manufacturing, service supports, etc. Among these integrated activities, product design and development (PDD) activities, which are considered high value-added in the manufacturing industry, are becoming highly strategic to business success. The PDD activities encompass distributed, collaborative, innovative, knowledge-intensive, high value-added and customer-focused demands so as to promote productivity, serviceability, shorten time-to-market and compensate high resource and/or labor costs. As product design commits more than 70% of the total costs incurred in product development, it is imperative to pay more attention to the design phase, especially in the early product conceptualization stage.