Information Model of a Virtual Community to Support Customer Cooperative Product Configuration

Web-based product configurator systems are a comprehensive way for firms, to give their customers an interactive overview of available product variants. By using a product configurator customers can “experience” how the product can be adapted in accordance to individual needs and preferences. But the more complex a product becomes the more tedious, confusing and even time consuming the configuration process for a single customer will be. In consequence customers may abort the configuration process if no additional support is provided to them. Therefore this paper presents an approach for supporting customers through a virtual customer community, enabling them to communicate with each other, mutually consult each other and even configure products in a collaborative manner. The main contribution of this paper is the proposal of an information model for a virtual community, which does not only facilitate the loose coupling of its members and the communication between them, but also provides possibilities for community members to actively form temporary teams and agree upon mutual goals for the purpose of executing joint configuration projects. Besides, it will be explained how community content items can be structured in accordance to the underlying product model of the configurator system.