Integrate Product Planning Process of OKP Companies in the Cloud Manufacturing Environment

Abstract

In today’s competitive market, OKP companies operate in the “engineer-to-order” business mode, whereby analysing the “voice of customer” promptly and accurately in the early design stage determines the success of product development. However, OKP companies have limited resources. They may not be able to afford the cost of the complicated Quality Function Deployment (QFD) product planning process, nor can they obtain abundant CRs information effectively in traditional internet-based environment. This paper proposes a QFD-based approach in the cloud manufacturing (CMfg) environment to enhance OKP companies’ product planning process. CMfg (a newly emerged manufacturing paradigm) utilizes advanced information technologies and business mode, which may provide sufficient and cost-effective resources to OKP companies. The interaction process among different cloud service roles is introduced in detail, which contains six main parts: pre-process, identify CRs, competitive marketing analysis, determine final importance ratings, mapping CRs to engineering characteristics (ECs), and customer-centric decision making.