Development and Implementation of Product Configuration Systems in Small and Medium Size Enterprises
Wang Hay Chan
Mass customization has been recognized as important marketing strategies in today’s competitive environment. Many enterprises have been demanding to produce their products as variety as possible to achieve all world-wide customer requests. This market demand has brought new challenges to many enterprises on keeping the product variety, shortening lead times and reducing costs. Recently, Product Configuration Systems have become significant in addressing many of the design issues related to mass customization. Many of leading Computer-aided design (CAD) vendors such as Dassault Systems, UGS and PTC also integrate or link with product configuration spectrums for realizing the concept of mass customization during the design stage of product development. Unfortunately, this technique has been popularly applied to small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) in some developing countries because of the high investment, limited resource and insufficient knowledge of their employees who have been working along the old model for quite a while.
In this regard, a university-industry collaborative research project has been launched. The main goal of this project is to develop and implement the product configuration systems that can be easily adopted by SMEs. This paper will show the practical results of the product configuration systems from its conception, through creation and implementation to evaluation.