"Preface The current marketplace is undergoing an accelerated pace of change that challenges corporations to apply new techniques to respond rapidly to this ever-developing environment. At the center of this change is a new generation of customers. As the industry adopts a consumer focus in its product development strategy, it must offer broader product ranges, shorter model lifetimes, and the required ability to process products in less time and costs. A consumer-focused product design must simultaneously meet the conflicting objectives of consumer and manufacturer. It is based on premises that (a) changing customer requirements dictate varied product features, (b) the structure of products and processes must be aligned with dynamic product features, and (c) manufacturing productivity requires managing conflicting objectives due to these structural alignments. Organizations now fail or succeed based upon their ability to respond quickly to changing customer demands and to utilize new technological innovations. In such an environment, the advantage goes to the firm that can offer greater varieties of new products with higher performance and more overall appeal. In order to compete in this fast-paced global market, organizations need to produce products that can be easily configured to offer distinctive capabilities compared to the competition. Furthermore, organizations need to develop new methods and techniques to react rapidly to required changes and to shorten the product development cycle, which will enable them to gain more economic competitiveness. This edited book is a collection of methods and state-of-the-art technologies in new strategies for customerfocused product design and development".

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