Abstract
The customer as co-creator of products is a grand challenge the entire consumer products manufacturing industry is facing. The design, manufacture and delivery of mass personalised consumer products must not only meet customer preferences but must be produced economically and sustainably too. Re-Distributed Manufacturing (RDM) has the potential to disrupt the way products are designed, produced and consumed products across their entire lifecycle and will allow the creation of disruptive business models and entirely new supply chain structures. New structures of design and manufacturing can enable large reductions in resource consumption by limiting waste in a supply chain (e.g. reducing transport distances) and through addressing the flows of resources at critical times in the lifecycle of products. It can also enable reduction of R&D waste by enabling a more targeted delivery of custom products to meet specific user needs and demands in different contexts and across extended timespans of the product lifecycle. Few manufacturers have started experimenting with open innovation to address the two manufacturing challenges of: (i) the ability to identify rapidly the needs and preferences of different market segments; (ii) the ability to respond quickly and flexibly to those. This paper demonstrates a model-based methodology and information technology to engage consumers at large scales to drive new product and manufacturing process development to address these challenges. An orange beverage has been selected to show that by linking a game-like consumer facing web application and a novel computer driven flow manufacturing system, target sensory attributes obtained by consumer groups can be rapidly translated into a new formulation recipe and its manufacturing process of a beverage that meets those needs and prototyped for that consumer group to evaluate. One can then envisage future scenarios where formulated consumer products are rapidly co-created and produced serving the needs of localised markets.
Highlights
Nowadays the process of designing and developing new products to meet consumer expectations is becoming a complex task
Intrinsic and extrinsic quality determinants involve in the success of New Product Development (NPD) such as globalisation, mass-individuation, the physical characteristics of product itself and environmental variables
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a model-based methodology and information technology to engage consumers at large scales to drive new product and manufacturing process development to address these challenges
Summary
Nowadays the process of designing and developing new products to meet consumer expectations is becoming a complex task. Advanced technologies that deliver a variety of products should be properly adopted to become competitive tools for manufacturing companies in global markets [1] [2]. These factors (i.e. changing in consumers’ lifestyle and values) as well as short product lifecycles have shifted the NPD process from a step-by-step approach to a continuous one focused on consumer values (i.e. close-loop approach) [3]. Re-Distributed Manufacturing (RDM) can reinforce this enabling the delivery of tailored, first-time-right product to consumers
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