Manufacturer centralised environment for product life cycle analysis, supplier selection and knowledge allocation

With the rapid development of technologies and the turbulent market environment, manufacturing industry is challenged with the task of designing customized products in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Systematically capturing and transforming customer, competitor, and manufacture's own information into various product development stages became vital for a manufacture stays in a competitive position. The purpose of this research is to establish a manufacturer-centralized environment for manufacturer to stay in a competitive position with particular focus on the issues of product life cycle, supplier selection and knowledge allocation. To effectively analysis information and to provide solutions, multiple techniques including Quality Function Deployment, Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, and Analytical Hierarchy Process/Analytical Network Process have been integrated with the Web Service and Enterprise JavaBeans technologies to implement the environment.