Collaborative product development in SMEs: requirements and a proposed solution

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are facing a more difficult situation in a globally competitive market than large organizations because of SMEs´ limited financial and technical capability. In order to survive, they must change the way they do businesses and improve the way they develop products. This paper discusses requirements of collaborative product development (CPD) in SMEs and presents a proposed solution to facilitate CPD in SMEs, In the proposed approach, an Internet-based collaborative platform provides all participants with fundamental functionalities for collaborative product development. In the middle layer of the system architecture, a process management module, a product structure management module, a VR module, and a multimedia conferencing module work together to support collaboration among product development team members. Implementation issues are addressed and future work is discussed.