In today's competitive and globalized business environment, bidding plays an increasingly important role in realizing enterprises' business strategies. In order to increase the probability of winning during bidding process, a competitive bid, which may satisfy customer demands as well as possess lower project costs and shorter time durations, becomes a norm. However, coordination between product conceptualization and bidding process, which integrates customer requirements handling and bid preparation in the early stage of product development, has not been well addressed. Accordingly, a so-called customer-oriented collaborative design and bidding system (C{sup}2DBS) is proposed in this paper. In C{sup}2DBS, the initial product platform as well as design options of a specific product are solicited using general sorting. Meanwhile, the restricted Coulomb energy (RCE) neural network is used for estimating the customer preference levels of cost and time attributes with respect to different multicultural customer groups. Subsequently, a cost-time-pair resulted from the RCE network is used as an index of selecting preferred product concept for bid preparation. A web implementation of C{sup}2DBS is postulated and a case study on cellular phone design is provided to illustrate the proposed prototype system.
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