A system framework for OKP product planning in a cloud-based design environment

Nowadays, one-of-a-kind (OKP) companies, which generally operate in an 'engineer-to-order' business mode, strive to deliver individualized products with quality to achieve customer satisfaction. Thus, an accurate and prompt analysis of customer requirements (CRs) in the early design stage is critical to its success. However, most OKP companies are small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Due to the limited resources and low product planning budget, they often cannot obtain abundant CR information nor can they afford the expense of complicated planning process. To address these issues, a system framework is proposed in support of OKP product planning process in a cloud-based design (CBD) environment. The challenges and future market niches of OKP companies are presented. The comparison of typical distributed systems shows that CBD, which utilizes advanced information technologies and business model, has advantages in providing sufficient resources, decreasing product development time span for OKP companies in a cost-efficient way. This article describes the proposed system architecture, the business interaction process and the information communication among customers, designers and marketing analysts at the product planning stage. To validate the proposed framework, a prototype system module MyProduct is under development in the CBD environment with an illustrative example.