Abstract
Many of today's products are so complex that no single company has all the necessary knowledge about either the product or the required processes to completely design and manufacturing. The customer-supplier relationship has undergone substantial transformation over the past 30 years, from a traditional relationship centered largely on the customer towards a current focus on partnership and lean supply. Some of the benefits of Early Supplier Involvement (ESI) in New Product Development (NPD) process include : reduced development cost; higher quality with fewer defects; reduced time to marker; supplier-oriented innovation; and so on. This paper discusses the strategic integration between customer and supplier in NPD process. We typify the customer/supplier collaborative activities in NPD process. Then, an implementation perspective for realizing computer-supported ESI in NPD process are presented, based on our ANetCoDE which is a hybrid multi-agent architecture for distributed collaborative engineering environment. Some key features are discussed, including collaborative specification establishment, solid model-based communication and agent-based collaboration through the medium of "guest agent" and "site agent".
