The increasing stress of global competition forces Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) in the industrial goods sector to carry out ongoing reengineering activities of manufacturing

In most industrial Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME) communication with customers is conducted exclusively by marketing, sales and service. Nowadays those business units apply Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to systematically gather information for the operational support of customer processes. Several studies illustrate that in the respective processes a vast body of additional information streams in directly from the customers, that cannot be collected in a structured form with current CRM systems. Examples include product demands, product experience or benefits of competitor-products. Moreover this information is only rarely transferred to the business units R&D and production. For those product oriented business customer knowledge is imperative for effective product development and enhancement. Without data integration across units’ borders a valuable source of available customer information is neglected. This situation motivates the development of a concept for a solution that facilitates gathering product oriented customer data with CRM systems, and that enables a direct transfer into existing CAx systems. The solution utilizes feature technologies which are modified to enable the direct integration of “customer based features” into CAx systems. In this way, the voice of the customer can be immediately used to enhance product development and manufacturing processes. Feasibility and validity of the concept are evaluated by building a prototype that enhances and integrates both a typical CRM system and a standard CAD system. Index Terms — CRM, CRM integration, customer based product features, customer product knowledge management