Customer Co-Design for Mass Customised products using Rapid Manufacturing Technologies
Daniel Eyers
Authors - Daniel Eyers & Hartanto Wong
The next era of Mass Customisation will involve greater customer involvement in the development of co-designed products. In co-design, the customer is directly involved in the design and/or configuration of products to best meet their individual requirements. Customer participation has already been recognised as an important consideration in the provision of Mass Customised goods. Previously it has been argued that the point of customer involvement in the production cycle influences the degree of customisation which is provided, and for companies wishing to offer higher degrees of customisation, achieving earlier customer involvement is an important objective. Co-design is therefore a major contributor to the achievement of Mass Customised products.
The focus of recent research has been the cost-effective elicitation of customer requirements, particularly in the development of software configurators. Such tools can be viewed as one method for co-design enablement, resulting in the selection of customer choices from a predetermined set of options. These options are typically constrained, since limitations exist in many manufacturing processes to viably produce high varieties of products. One of the major inhibitors to this Mass Customised manufacture is the fixed costs of manufacture such as moulds and tooling which are requisite for each customised product.
It is therefore observed that co-design opportunities are interrelated to the constraints imposed by manufacturing. This paper considers the implications for co-design when such manufacturing constraints can be reduced. Specifically, it attempts to qualitatively assess to what extent the advanced manufacturing technologies of Rapid Manufacturing can enable greater levels of co-design. In these additive manufacturing processes, products are manufactured from 3D CAD models without the need for prior manufacture of fixtures or tooling, reducing both costs and the complexity issues associated with design for manufacture. In RM, customers may use existing 3D CAD tools to customise designs in more exacting conformance to their requirements than the more limiting approach necessitated by conventional manufacture.
To explore the extent co-design of products is changed as a consequence of RM, several products from different industries are presented in case studies. For each product, a detailed comparison is made between conventional manufacturing techniques and the RM approach. Particular focus is given to both the changed degree of customisation and also the changed involvement of the customer in the co-design process. From this assessment, consideration is given to the capabilities still missing to afford a higher degree of co-design in Rapid Manufacturing.