Knowledge integration and sharing for complex product development

Product development is a highly creative and knowledge-intensive process that involves extensive information and knowledge exchange and sharing among geographically distributed teams and developers. How to best integrate such heterogeneous product knowledge has become an extremely important knowledge management (KM) subject associated with product development. Product development knowledge integration and sharing is becoming a key issue in the enterprise KM. This paper addresses the challenges of product development knowledge integration and sharing during product development. The aim of this research work effort is to develop a method to enhance the integration and sharing of product knowledge during the development phase. This study presents a systematic approach to developing knowledge integration and sharing for product development. The proposed approach includes the steps for designing a framework of product development knowledge sharing, developing representation model for product development knowledge, designing product development knowledge sharing process, designing product development knowledge integration ontology, developing knowledge integration and sharing method for product development based on ontology, and implementation of product development knowledge integration and sharing method. The proposed method could bring out an efficient and proactive way for knowledge integration and sharing among product developers in the product development process.     

Design through making: crafts knowledge as facilitator to collaborative new product development

Collaboration between manufacturers and craft makers is believed by many crafts theorists to offer new originality, insight and specialist expertise to design for production. In practice, however, there exists a discrepancy between this ideal and a reality of unreconcilable cultural and methodological differences. This paper documents and discusses such a collaboration as an example of best practice with implications for managers, educators, designers and craft makers. It identifies a new role for craft makers with the appropriate knowledge and experience to act as bridges within companies, facilitating the adoption of design methodologies appropriate to changing priorities in the manufacturing industries.     

Graph-based knowledge reuse for supporting knowledge-driven decision-making in new product development

Pre-existing knowledge buried in manufacturing enterprises can be reused to help decision-makers develop good judgements to make decisions about the problems in new product development, which in turn speeds up and improves the quality of product innovation. This paper presents a graph-based approach to knowledge reuse for supporting knowledge-driven decision-making in new product development. The paper first illustrates the iterative process of knowledge-driven decision-making in new product development. Then, a novel framework is proposed to facilitate this process, where knowledge maps and knowledge navigation are involved. Here, OWL ontologies are employed to construct knowledge maps, which appropriately capture and organise knowledge resources generated at various stages of product lifecycle; the Personalised PageRank algorithm is used to perform knowledge navigation, which finds the most relevant knowledge in knowledge maps for a given problem in new product development. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach are demonstrated through a case study and two performance evaluation experiments.     

A holistic view of knowledge integration in collaborative supply chains

New product development (NPD) projects offer a unique opportunity to examine knowledge integration themes in a collaborative network. We propose a finer grained view of knowledge integration mechanisms in collaborative supply chains. Specifically, we propose two different types of mechanisms that are in play within a collaborative supply chain; short-term knowledge sharing and iterative knowledge enrichment. Using data from a large and diverse set of 432 NPD projects, we investigate the effects of knowledge sharing and enrichment between firms and their collaborative network partners, on product concept effectiveness and process performance. Our findings suggest that knowledge sharing and enrichment are significant mechanisms for enterprise-wide knowledge integration in collaborative networks. In addition, upstream knowledge sharing and enrichment has a significant influence on both product concept effectiveness and manufacturing process performance, over and above the effects of downstream knowledge sharing and enrichment. The relationship of upstream and downstream knowledge sharing and enrichment on product concept effectiveness and process performance had varying effects based on the contexts of product type, stage in the product life cycle and project size, indicating a context-specific influence of knowledge strategies. The implication of our results on academic theory and managerial practice is offered.     

A simulation approach for evaluation and improvement of organisational planning in collaborative product development projects

Human behaviour and organisational structure impact collaborative product development outcome on a large scale. Therefore, companies are continuously seeking new opportunities to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and predictability of their collaborative product development projects, and to develop innovative principles for organisational design and management such as multi-functional teams. However, there are many factors which have to be considered and assessed to systematically optimise organisational planning in respect of team configuration, structure organisation, and human behaviour. This paper proposes an agent-based simulation methodology to evaluate and improve the organisational planning in complex product development projects. An agent-based integrated simulation model is formulated which can explicitly represent human behaviour, organisational interactions, and tasks networks. Based on the model, the design agent structure and behaviour protocols are studied in detail, and a simulation platform is developed. Finally, the methodology is evaluated in a collaborative roadway design project, and several management insights are established, which are proven to be effective for the organisational optimisation. The results of the case study also show that the methodology can effectively support the evaluation and improvement of organisational planning.     

An integrated fuzzy approach for information technology planning in collaborative product development

Collaborative product development (CPD) processes are generally based on technological infrastructures. Various information technologies (IT) are proposed every day to facilitate collaboration, integration, co-design and co-development processes. In this highly uncertain environment, a systematic methodology is essential to plan the IT infrastructure needed to start and maintain a collaborative process. This study offers an integrated IT planning methodology combining fuzzy quality function deployment, fuzzy axiomatic design and fuzzy rule-based systems. The methodology is tested in a CPD case and the outcome presents an improvement path for IT for each of the collaborative parties.     

State-of-the-art technologies and methodologies for collaborative product development systems

In order to facilitate product realisation processes, presently, research is actively being carried out to develop methodologies and technologies to support geographically dispersed teams to organise collaborative design based on the quickly evolving information technologies. A number of research works and commercial systems have appeared to provide solutions for collaborative and distributed product development, and the practical applications are getting more pervasive and mature. In this paper, the recently related works are summarised from three aspects—visualisation-based collaborative systems, co-design collaborative systems and CE (concurrent engineering)-based collaborative systems. Around these aspects, about 100 papers and 30 commercial systems/international standards published or launched recently are discussed. The current research and development statuses and issues, underlying algorithms, mechanisms and system architectures, and the future trends and challenges are explained and compared in detail.     

Bridging customer knowledge to innovative product development: a data mining approach

In the big data era, firms are inundated with customer data, which are valuable in improving services, developing new products, and identifying new markets. However, it is not clear how companies apply data-driven methods to facilitate customer knowledge management when developing innovative new products. Studies have investigated the specific benefits of applying data-driven methods in customer knowledge management, but failed to systematically investigate the specific mechanics of how firms realised these benefits. Accordingly, this study proposes a systematic approach to link customer knowledge with innovative product development in a data-driven environment. To mine customer needs, this study adopts the Apriori algorithm and C5.0 in addition to the association rule and decision tree methodologies for data mining. It provides a systematic and effective method for managers to extract knowledge ‘from’ and ‘about’ customers to identify their preferences, enabling firms to develop the right products and gain competitive advantages. The findings indicate that the knowledge-based approach is effective, and the knowledge extracted is shown as a set of rules that can be used to identify useful patterns for both innovative product development and marketing strategies.     

基于有色Petri网的产品协同开发过程建模方法研究

产品协同开发过程具有层次性、分布性、离散性和动态性等特点,采用合理方法构建其有效的过程模型成为协同开发过程管理与优化的基础性条件.将有色Petri网(CPN)技术引入产品协同开发过程建模中,针对性地提出了产品协同开发过程CPN模型的描述性定义;并从协同开发特点出发,为支持基本过程逻辑的描述由工作流原语定义了基本网模型结构;为了描述复杂协同关系,结合模块化方法及库所变迁性质给出了扩展网模型结构的构建方法.该方法实现了将协同开发过程关系从基本到复杂都能映射到相应CPN网上,并通过实例进一步说明了该方法的有效性.     

Improved new product development through enhanced design architecture for engineer-to-order companies

There are many challenges that face companies today in the new product introduction process. These can include reduced design times, fast times to market, improved quality and the need for constant price reductions in order to keep up with the competition. Engineer-to-order firms face even more challenges because of the ‘build to order’ way that they must do business. This study presents new ways for these companies to meet the challenges posed by the market using a business case relating to the product introduction process at a mid-size (～$75 million annual sales) engineer-to-order manufacturer of flexible printed circuits. The company has developed a new product introduction process that seeks to improve quality and delivery times as well as process development for the project at hand. These suggested outcomes of the improved process are generic and widely applicable to contract manufacturers involved in the new product introduction process enabling them to work closely with customers thereby effectively addressing their design concerns. The updated procedures are examined in-depth and the associated forms and record-keeping methods are presented and analysed. The new product introduction process utilises Deming's plan, do, check and act process improvement cycle. Finally, various contributions emanating from the study that enhance our understanding of any engineer-to-order new product development environment are presented.     

A semantic-based visualised wiki system (SVWkS) for lesson-learned knowledge reuse situated in product design

In the process of product design, engineers usually find it is difficult to precisely find and reuse others’ empirical knowledge resources, especially the lesson-learned knowledge, which is usually not well collected by the organisation. This study proposes a novel approach, which uses a semantic-based visualised wiki system (SVWkS) to support lesson-learned knowledge reuse. The core of visualised knowledge search framework is a semantic-based topic knowledge map. The architecture of this knowledge map creation method is designed, which has five major modules: lesson-learned items pre-processing, topic extraction, topic relation computation, topic weight computation and topic knowledge map generation modules. Then a working scenario of SVWkS is briefly introduced. We have conducted three sets of experiments to evaluate quality of visualised results-knowledge map, the effectiveness of semantic-based visualised searching mechanisms and the performance of utilising SVWkS for knowledge reuse in outfitting design of a ship-building company. The first experiment shows that knowledge maps generated by SVWkS are accepted by domain experts from the evaluation since precision and recall are high. The second experiment shows a semantic-based visualised searching mechanism supported by semantic relations is more useful than a traditional keyword search in terms of precision and recall. The third experiment shows that SVWkS-based group outperforms keyword search-based group in both learning score and satisfaction level, which are two measurements of performance of utilising SVWkS. The promising results confirm the feasibility of SVWkS in helping engineers to find needed lesson-learned knowledge and reuse-related knowledge.     

Improving the design phase through interorganisational product knowledge models

This paper focuses on the use of interorganisational knowledge models with the purpose of standardising engineer-to-order (ETO) products. Such product variant reductions can lead to decreased costs for both the ETO company and its suppliers without reducing sales. In spite of the attention that supply chain integration has received in the literature, supply chain integration with a focus on the integration of product knowledge in ETO companies and their suppliers has not received much attention. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to define this type of supply chain integration. The concept is investigated by a case study, which supports the claim that supply chain product knowledge integration is an approach for increasing the competitiveness of ETO companies and their suppliers. Given the gap in the literature, the paper may potentially open a new horizon for studying supply chain integration.     

Development of a collaborative product development framework based on centre-satellite system and service-oriented architecture

To increase competitive advantage for manufacturers, collaboration product development (CPD) has recently become an important issue. Based on the CPD concept, this study focuses on the centre-satellite system (CSS) with five major roles (i.e. centre factory) and their interactions and the technology of web services using service-oriented architecture (SOA) to propose a system framework, entitled the collaborative product development framework for centre satellite system (CPDF-CSS). The CPDF-CSS comprises five modules: CF-MA module, DH-MA module, ODM-MA module, OEM-MA module, and EC-MA module. Next, based on the CPDF-CSS, a generic communication component (GCC) is designed for the interoperability among five modules under heterogeneous contexts. Finally, this study presents a case involving the motorcycle industry for evaluating the implementation of CPDF-CSS. The contributions of this study to the CPD are discussed.     

Technology solutions for product lifecycle knowledge management: framework and a case study

Information technology has promoted our society gradually into knowledge economy from product economy. Value creation requires more and more knowledge and information to support enterprise activities. Knowledge management (KM) as an activity has already existed, and will make the organisation and individual have stronger competition strength, and make better decisions. In order to respond to the industrial trend towards knowledge management, this paper investigates and proposes a framework for product lifecycle knowledge management that utilises product maintenance data across the lifecycle of the product. A case presented in this paper is a maintenance knowledge service system to prove the framework method.     

信息时代产品开发设计的团队协作

随着以计算机技术为代表的信息时代的到来,团队协作已成为信息时代产品开发设计的主要特征.以目前团队协作普遍存在的问题出发,阐述了团队组织的构建方法及团队协作在具体阶段的实施,并认为设计将进入团队协作的时代.     

注塑新产品开发中的设计验证

为减少新产品开发中的设计错误,针对技术不确定性假设,综合运用样品技术、实践经验、试验方法、CAD技术、CAE技术,提出了6种设计验证方法.这些方法包括：基于粗略/精确样品的设计验证、基于经验的设计验证、基于实验的设计验证、基于CAD的设计验证、基于加工仿真的设计验证以及基于集成仿真的设计验证.通过注塑制品开发实例,表明这些设计验证方法可应用于新产品开发的概念提出、设计工程、原型测试及试生产阶段.     

The influence of different knowledge workers on innovation strategy and product development performance in small and medium-sized enterprises

Despite significant interest on the topic of knowledge workers, the understanding of how they influence certain aspects of firm innovativeness remains limited. In particular, while different types of knowledge workers exist, their particular synergistic effects on new and improved product development within smaller firms has received less attention. Drawing on the knowledge-based view (KBV), we posit that innovation strategy plays an instrumental role in linking the effects of knowledge workers, thereby leading to greater product development outcomes from different types of knowledge workers. Moreover, some suggest that beyond a certain point, there is a diminishing return to increasing the proportion of knowledge workers in an organisation; however, the basis of this finding is within larger firms. This study investigates whether high-level (e.g. engineers and scientists) and low-level (e.g. technicians and machine operators) knowledge workers exert varying effects on performance in terms of new and improved product development. Data from 205 small and medium-sized high-tech manufacturing firms provide support that distinguishing among types of knowledge workers is important given that they impact new and improved product development differently. Furthermore, innovation strategy plays a synergistic role, positively mediating the effects of different types of knowledge workers on innovation outcomes.     

知识管理系统的运用与深化

在知识经济时代,企业已经开始认识到最宝贵的资产是知识,知识不但是生产的关键要素,而且还是企业保持持续竞争优势的重要手段。企业知识管理系统的有效实施,要在正确的思想指导下,建立适于知识共享的组织结构和企业文化,在理解和实施知识管理时必须坚持积累、信任、共享、交流、学习五项原则。知识管理的目标是实现组织总体发展战略,因此知识共享的过程也必须以实现组织战略目标为前提,重视对共享知识的甄选,建立知识共享平台和存储管理单元,引导知识交流,实施奖励政策。     

异地协同设计制造关键技术及系统实现

 在分析制造业面临的新挑战以及网络化制造特点的基础上,提出了基于Web的异地协同设计制造系统的体系结构并开发了一个实际系统eCWS(e—cooperative work system )．详细介绍了该系统的功能和关键技术的实现,包括协同系统管理、协同工作管理、协同应用、约束管理和冲突消解、协同工具、安全控制、分布式产品数据管理等技术． 最后介绍了应用实例．