Collaborative Product Development

Abstract

This chapter discusses the roles of electronic business solutions (EBSs) in supporting collaborative product development (CPD). Two fundamental questions are of primary interest. One is when and where EBSs should be applied for what CPD decision activities. The other is how EBSs should be designed and developed to maximize their usefulness and usability in supporting CPD decision activities. The author advocates an approach based on decision activities. By this approach, CPD is considered as an extended enterprise business process, which is in turn decomposed into relatively simpler business decision processes (e.g., design specification, design review and release, design change management, etc.). Such decomposition takes place towards the level where appropriate EBSs can be most cost-effectively designed, developed, and applied. The logics and data requirements of these business decision processes form the natural basis for designing the navigations and user interfaces as well as the back-end databases and middleware for the corresponding EBSs. Individual EBSs related to product design and development decisions are then collated and deployed to form what is described in this chapter as a collaborative product commerce (CPC) portal — a special enterprise portal. The proposed approach is demonstrated with several examples as has been followed by many researchers and practitioners.