A Personalized Attribute Determination Process in a Cloud-Based Adaptable Product Configurator

Abstract

Product configurator, as an effective tool in mapping customer requirements with company’s existing product attributes, enables customers’ satisfaction and companies’ competitiveness in a cost-efficient way. However, with the tendency towards mass personalization, customers are not only just selecting from each company’s own options in a ‘configure-to-order’ model, but also more actively involved in the product development process to create their own individualized products in an ‘engineer-to-order’ model. Besides, the existing configurators generally apply the same matching procedures to all the customers in the same sequential way, which is tedious and time consuming, especially for the complicated product configuration. Aiming to solve these problems, this paper proposes a personalized product configuration process to determine design attributes in a cloud-based environment, which is based on two assumptions: 1) products need to be adaptable enough for configuration; 2) customers prefer to develop new designs from the existing products in a tangible or visualized way other than design from scratch. The proposed process is capable of handling personalized requirements by adding new modules or upgrading design attributes in the existing product family. An illustrative example shows its advantages in customer-centric product development process.