Web-enabled Customer-oriented Product Concept Formation via Laddering Technique and Kohonen Association

Product concept formation is regarded as a key activity in new product development and manufacturing (NPD&M). It may determine whether a NPD&M project will be successful or not. In the early stage of product concept formation, owing to the huge space of possible solutions as well as incomplete and imprecise information, it is difficult for designers to generate functional attributes and subsequently select customer-preferred design solutions. Although much research has been attempted to tackle this problem, few of them are capable of appropriately making a trade-off between initial design requirements of designers and those of customers. This study aims at establishing a prototype web-based customer-oriented product concept formation system. The prototype system involves customers in generating functional attributes and design alternatives as well as selecting preferred design solutions. To realize these, the laddering technique is first employed to set up a so-called functional attribute hierarchy (FAH) comprising different levels ranging from generic to specific abstraction. With the FAH established, diverse design alternatives can then be configured morphologically using a combination of alternative values. Consequently, through customer interaction via the web, the Kohonen association algorithm is utilized to facilitate the selection of preferred design alternatives according to multicultural customer groups. The details of the prototype system as well as a case study on wood golf club design, which is used to illustrate its capability, are presented in this paper.