A distributed e-commerce system for virtual product development teams

This paper presents a distributed information system that facilitates virtual multidisciplinary product development activities. A growing problem today for many companies is that of facing up to increasing global competition, increasing the importance of delivering the right product at the right time and at the least cost. To enable a company to provide competitive services, concurrent engineering methods are employed progressively more often. However, a truly effective concurrent engineering team requires specialists in a wide variety of occupations and skill bases. Effective communication and exchange of information between members usually require not only face-to-face meetings but also highly advanced tools. Various tools have been developed in the past with the premise of facilitating effective communication. However, these have realistically only covered a subsection of the total product development life-cycle. The work presented here displays an approach to the problem in terms of an Internet-based system, which provides a mechanism to allow integrated information sharing from the initial concepts through to the realization and the marketing of a product. The system effectively removes the barriers between people and incompatible computer systems and resulting from non-standardization.