Manufacturing to demand: initial explorations in linking product with market modelling

Summary form only given as follows. Enterprise integration, which requires the interconnection of business processes, is just one means of improving the competitiveness of an organization. The research reported here discusses an approach that offers the potential to link the seemingly disparate areas of manufacturing, marketing and distribution. Many organizations are becoming market rather than production driven and we believe that links between the market and production can make a major contribution to their agility. Product data engineering research in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Leeds was established some 10 years ago and is currently directed towards understanding the role of product and manufacturing models and structures in business processes. Researchers in the School of Geography at Leeds have developed a set of mathematical models that allow the richness and complexity of today's consumer markets to be understood and predicted. These models have been successfully applied to the automotive industry and are now being used by a major automotive company to develop a distribution strategy for the year 2000 both in Europe and North America. This research couples these two strands of research by making use of mathematical models of consumer markets together with product data engineering work on the representation of product specifications. A product specification captures the functional characteristics that a product must satisfy. This paper reports an early exploration which was undertaken using the automotive industry as a case study.