Collaborative engineering decision-making for building information channels and improving Web visibility of product manufacturers

Product manufacturers have spent the last years improving productivity and process efficiency in order to face increasingly competitive markets. Today, the visibility of technological innovations has become essential to achieve the targeted market. It is now very difficult for a product manufacturer to reach customers without owning a website that is visible on search engine results pages. The goal of this paper is to build information channels between a company and its customers through improving both a company's content of information on the Web and its website rank on the Internet through search engine results pages. Company information and knowledge are distributed through multiple stakeholders. The problem of building information channels between a company and customers is solved through a collaborative and distributed approach, on the one hand, and is supported by decision-making tools, on the other hand. The paper proposes an engineering model for building information channels and improving the visibility of the company on the Web. Agents are used for the implementation of the approach. The proposed model and its implementation handle the requirements, constraints, functions and solutions for improving Web visibility. The prototype tool, called CAWIS (Computer Aided Web Information Sharing), examines Web visibility in real time and evaluates the performance of the proposed content of information. CAWIS allows an exploratory and open way for building information channels and improving the visibility of product manufacturers on the Web.