Implementation of Collaborative Design in a Small Company: A Case Study

Implementation of collaborative design (CD) projects can enable a firm transforming its business model in order to improve the competency. The practices of applying CD to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), however, can hardly be found in the literature. The major purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a small company, which design and manufacture fabrics machines, can apply CD to earn dramatic performance improvement. The problems encountered in the case company and how its top managers transformed the business model into design-to-order allowing customers to participate in designing machines, and developed suitable environment and information system for better customer service are also described. This paper applies design chain operations reference (DCOR) model to depict the process reengineering and performance metrics in the case company. The implementation process of CD on the case company can serve as a reference model to many other SMEs.