Design in the New e-Commerce Era

The computing and communication have become indispensable in every aspect of design and manufacturing. Its impacts on production engineering community have been significant and long lasting. In this paper, we reviewed new e-Commerce models that directly link among production capabilities and with end consumers. We then identified three major forces that will affect the design community, namely, speed of decision, expansion of scope and degree of concurrency. Understanding the implication of these forces would be conducive to leading structural changes in design. The transformations include expanding the scope of design, linking customers and suppliers proactively throughout the entire value chain, and collaborating across boundaries.