PDCS-a product definition and customisation system for product concept development

In recent years, owing to the rapid changing customer needs and much shorter product life cycle than ever before, employing more efficient and flexible approaches for product concept development has become an imperative for a successful product. This work aims at establishing a novel product definition and customisation system (PDCS) for organisations to meet this demand in today's competitive and globalised business climate. A prototype PDCS is proposed, from a design knowledge-handling viewpoint, in this paper. It comprises two phases, namely, product definition using the laddering technique and a novel design knowledge hierarchy (DKH), and product customisation using an integrated methodology of conjoint analysis (CA) and Kohonen association (KA) techniques. Basically, this system is a method of making design decisions via customer involvement, i.e. a strategy for transferring customer preference into a specific product concept. A case study on wood golf club design has been used to illustrate and validate the PDCS. The details of the validation are discussed.