The virtual enterprise (VE) concept is one of the most important ways to raise the agility and competitiveness of a manufacturing enterprise. Under this concept a master company develops its products by using the manufacturing resources of external partners. Thus product design and partner selection or partner synthesis become two important issues. In this paper, we propose an integrated product design and partner synthesis process model, and develop an architecture of computer-aided product design and partner synthesis system for the VE (CAPDPS), in which product design and the partner synthesis module and the respective databases are implemented. Partner synthesis activity, in this paper, is divided into two phases: partner type synthesis and partner instance synthesis. In the partner type synthesis phase, group technology (GT) is applied for retrieving and selecting potential partners. In the partner instance synthesis phase, more factors other than the cost are identified, and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method is employed to select the best partner from the potential ones. A specific automobile manufacturing group (including master company and its partner factories) and its typical product – automobile steering assembly – are used as a case to verify the feasibility of the proposed approach.