Explication and sharing of design knowledge through a novel product design approach

At the beginning of the 21st century, the emergence of knowledge management is viewed as a natural evolution. Knowledge management is defined as the formal management of knowledge for facilitating creation, access, and reuse of knowledge, typically by using advanced technology. To be easily communicated and shared, tacit knowledge has to be explicated as explicit knowledge (e.g., in product specification or a scientific formula or production rules); and this explicit knowledge has to be shared as applicable data through the use of information technology. Product design is such a business process that a great part of the design knowledge is often a tacit type, being difficult to share, or available only in forms of natural language documents. However, the expertise recorded in these documents is an essential resource of successful competition in the market. This paper presents a knowledge explication and sharing approach; specifically focusing on the knowledge management of modular product design. The solution approach involves modeling modular products, formulating the explicit knowledge, discovering new design knowledge with data mining, and sharing the knowledge with web services technology. The proposed approach is to be applied to an actual case of motherboard design/assembly in one of the largest PC manufacturing enterprises.