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BULETINUL INSTITUTULUI POLITEHNIC DIN IAŞI
Publicat de
Universitatea Tehnică „Gheorghe Asachi” din Iaşi
Tomul LVI (LX), Fasc. 2, 2010
Secţia
CONSTRUCŢII DE MAŞINI
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FOR THE CONFIGURATION
IN EARLY PHASES OF COMPLEX CUSTOM PRODUCTS
BY
IRÈNE ALEXANDRESCU, HANS-JOACHIM FRANKE
and THOMAS VIETOR
Abstract. Nowadays, large and saturated markets in developed countries enforce
the production of a broad palette of customized products, which satisfy the customers’
individual needs. In addition, interesting emerging markets together with the constraints
of the current economic crisis lead to further differentiation in terms of product
functionality and allowable costs. Furthermore, global markets also imply many different
standards and norms, lately more strict due to the worldwide environmental concerns. In
order to be effective in producing custom products, companies in the field of mechanical
engineering integrate in their product lifecycle technologies the newest parametric
CAD/CAM systems, as well as different software for the sales and design departments,
such as configuration or calculation tools. However, producing high quality products with
relatively short delivery times requires that a common knowledge base exists between the
enterprise departments and clear processes and interfaces are defined, integrating all the
used systems. This is commonly not the case and therefore unnecessary iterations are
done in order to produce a technically correct offering based on the specific customer
request. This paper discusses the need and some ideas for a better methodology to faster
and better design complex custom products in the field of mechanical engineering. It
explains the need for a structured knowledge base prior to the beginning of the new
custom product design process. This knowledge base offers the necessary data for the
early design phases and connects the sales and design departments by ensuring a correct
and transparent information transfer between the customer requirements, the configuration
software, the used parametric CAD tools and the generated customer specific offers. The
result is a faster, optimized and technically correct basic configuration of custom products
in early design phases.
Key words: complex custom products, early design phases, product configuration,
knowledge management.
1. Introduction
The transfer from industrial to information and knowledge societies
radically transformed the markets and increased customer expectations.