Knowledge management for consumer-focused product design

As the automotive industry adopts a consumer focus in its product development strategy, it offers broader product ranges, shorter model lifetimes and the ability to process orders in arbitrary lot sizes. This offers the ability to conduct early product design and development trade-off analysis among these competing objectives. A distributed knowledge-based system, which analyzes, verifies, stores, and retrieves process definitions, is needed to manage the complexity of workflows. The use of information technologies and networking capabilities is essential in the dissemination of product knowledge in order to integrate the decision-making process among heterogeneous and distributed partners/units. This paper offers insights into a knowledge management approach that enables implementing a consumer-focused product design philosophy by integrating capabilities for intelligent information support and group decision-making utilizing a common enterprise network model and knowledge interface through shared ontologies. An automotive supply chain case study is utilized in illustrating the proposed approach.