Abstract
dc:description.abstractThe research work aims to investigate product development activities and provide an architecture for collaborative product development which provides useful support for a distributed collaboration and facilitate organisations to face increasing global competition. The objectives of the research are to: (1) develop an architecture for a collaborative product development environment to manage complex design processes that supports the needs for collaborating and sharing the information and tasks, involves functions from marketing analysis to concept development, (2) develop a systematic framework to deal with human aspects in the development of a human-centred system, (3) develop a working prototype using state-of-the-art Web technologies for collaborative product development and (4) evaluate the developed system through a case study. The developed system 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 system is integrated with product process planning software to facilitate project planning and management, computer-aided design software to assist the concept design and prototyping testing. It is designed in such a way to allow team members to cross the limitations of the geographic and temporal collaboration to obtain great levels of flexibility and agility. The main function of the system, besides allowing team members being able to work at distributed locations, is to ensure the overall coordination, control, consistency, and data integrity to avoid costly design iterations during the design process and to recommend appropriate marketing strategies, project planning, the selection of team members, and advanced functions for collaborative design. These recommendations include marketing information, human resources, manufacturing resources and capabilities that the user provides to this system. It enables project planners, marketing analysts, designers, suppliers, and manufacturing planners to work at the early stages to reduce any unnecessary wasted time, resources, and costs, thus increasing the total product quality, maximising the organisation resources used, and reducing the total product cost and lead-time. In addition, a novel systematic framework is introduced to manage the development of the proposed system, helping the system developer to identify and predict users’ needs and requirements in the early system design life cycle and guiding the intervention. The system, based on the extended Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model through the human agents, interconnects the gap between a networked environment and a non-networked environment to simulate the application protocols of the presentation layer to provide a virtual network interface. The developed system was validated using a case study in four design stages and obtained endorsement from potential users. The tangible benefit of implementing this system is that the complex product developing process is organised in a systematic, consistent and concurrent manner to enable the collaboration of the team members through the developed system. It accomplishes a guiding sequence that assists inexperienced users to follow the complex product developing 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-standardisation have been removed. In addition, the users can be flexible in their choice of the tool(s) or stage(s) and stored their data to local host and/or server based on their requirements.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- PhD
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- De Montfort University
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2005
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- TSENG, KEVIN C.