Design of customised products and manufacturing networks: towards frugal innovation

Abstract

ABSTRACTAs manufacturing companies move towards frugal innovation, more and more tools that take into account regional customer requirements and regionalisation practices are emerging. Information and communication technologies (ICT) are considered as a means to integrate customers into product design phase. Moreover, digitalised solutions that provide seamless decision-support tools that consider multi-conflicting criteria have emerged and are integrated in existing business models to provide holistic solutions. This paper presents a unified framework of an augmented reality product customisation application, which supports realistic product visualisation so as to extract end users’ requirement that provides input to a web-based supplier selection and the network design tool that considers frugal criteria. The two tools are connected and supported by a product lifecycle management (PLM) tool. The proposed framework is applied in a white-good industry case study and meaningful performance indicators provided by the industry are used to evaluate the proposed framework.