A study of bidding-oriented collaborative product conceptualization

Inter-organizational, collaborative product design plays an increasingly important role in new product development (NPD). To date, researchers in this field have emphasized embodiment design rather than product conceptualization, and approaches have rarely been tailored towards small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The collaborative processes of product conceptualization and contract bidding require coordination and trade-offs to be made between cost/complexity and performance. Hence, a bidding-oriented collaborative product conceptualization (BCPC) system has been developed that aims to enable cooperation among SMEs and negotiation with a main contractor. The BCPC system comprises three major interdependent perspectives: the business, process and technology perspectives. For initial product platform generation and eliciting design-bidding criteria, a well-established requirement acquisition technique known as general sorting was adapted and employed. To resolve subjective bid evaluation issues and select preferred product concepts containing ambiguous and qualitative information, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique was subsequently employed. A case study on cellular phone design is presented for system illustration.