scholarly journals CONTEXT-SPECIFIC AGILE PROCESS DESIGN TO SUPPORT THE PLANNING OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 491-500
Author(s):  
J. Baschin ◽  
T. Huth ◽  
T. Vietor

AbstractModern products are often developed in local distributed teams involving various engineering domains. As a result, product development processes are characterized by a high degree of complexity and individuality. However, the project context is often not integrated into the project planning, which can lead to uncertainties in the processes. In addition, reflection does not take place adequately in process execution. Therefore, this paper presents a concept for agile process design that enables reducing uncertainties based on context-specific reflections and adapting the processes.

Author(s):  
Amanda Bligh ◽  
Manbir Sodhi

Even though the literature on product and process development is extensive, not much attention has been devoted to categorizing the product development process itself. Existing work on product development processes such as Total Design, Integrated Product and Process Design among others advocate common approaches that should be followed throughout the organization, without any consideration of product characteristics. In this paper we review several existing development methodologies. Extensions of these are categorized by their applicability to different classes of products. We propose that development processes should be matched to product attributes and organization goals. Towards this end, we associate development processes along with their components such as House of Quality, Robust Design, TRIZ etc. with goals such as time to market, customer needs satisfaction, intellectual property generation, protection and exploitation, quality, product cost and others. We examine the impact of this association on the development process itself and propose guidelines for constructing specific processes associated with one or more goals. Tools and benchmarks for various applications are discussed, along with some case studies on the design of different development processes.


Author(s):  
Alejandro Balbontin ◽  
Baback Yazdani

Abstract This report presents the results of the 1998 Global New Product Development Survey, carried-out by the Warwick Manufacturing Group at the University of Warwick (UK). The survey is based on a questionnaire addressed to 637 firms with turnover greater than £ 30 million ($ 45 million), operating in the UK across key industrial sectors and engaged in New Product Development (NPD). Response rate was of 8%. Global NPD practices include product standardization, the strategy used to allocate NPD centers (related to business units and geographically), the level of centralization of tasks, the level of NPD outsourcing, the use of external collaboration and the use of Information Technology (IT) applications to support the NPD process. It was found that firms with products designed for global markets have about an 8 times greater potential to export than those firms who only standardize core components. Firms that collaborate more with external entities implement universal products more easily. Based on the “pretax profit in the last four years of business activity”, the respondent firms with losses have an average of 7 business sectors, whereas the top ten profitable firms have an average of only 4 business sectors, this relationship also applies to NPD activities. It was found that firms manage the collaborative ventures through either team members or team leaders and that top management involvement is only on a small scale. IT communication tools (e-mail and video-conferencing), followed by administration tools (project-planning and presentation software) are the main priorities in firms with widely distributed teams.


Author(s):  
W Eversheim ◽  
J Schröder ◽  
T Bauernhansl

Intranet-based methods and tools provide support to product development processes. Effectiveness (‘doing the right things’) is increased with the ‘PORTAL’ method by evaluation and selection of new project ideas. Efficiency (‘doing the things right’) is ensured by the Intranet-based product development manual and the included methods database supporting management of the selected product development projects.


2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (7) ◽  
pp. 889-900 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad H. Eslami ◽  
Nicolette Lakemond

Purpose This paper aims to address the need for managerial and organizational approaches to knowledge integration with customers in collaborative product development projects. The purpose is to identify the roles of customers in terms of the customer’s knowledge contribution and timing of customer collaboration in the product development process. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on a multi-case study approach, comprising four product development projects from two large international suppliers. The cases were selected following the theoretical replication logic. Data consist of interviews, workshops and secondary information. For each of the cases, a within-case analysis was performed followed by a cross-case analysis. Findings The study shows that the customer’s knowledge contribution is aligned with the specific requirements of each phase of the product development. Three specific customer roles are identified and connected to the customer’s knowledge contribution and the timing of customer collaboration. The technical capability of the customer and the locus of initiative of the product development project are affecting the prerequisites for knowledge integration with customers. Research limitations/implications The study is performed from the perspective of supplier firms. The authors have not been able to capture the perspective of the customer in detail. As it is expected that both customers and suppliers benefit from a systematic knowledge exchange, future studies could examine knowledge contributions in both directions. Practical implications The findings can be used to devise effective approaches for collaborative product development with customers related to the customer’s knowledge contribution and the timing of customer collaboration and provide guidance to firms seeking to benefit from knowledge residing at customers. Originality/value This is one of the first studies to focus on the integration of customers’ knowledge in product development processes. This paper contributes to the customer–supplier collaboration literature by presenting further insight into customers’ knowledge contributions, the timing of customer collaboration in product development processes and the prerequisites for knowledge integration with customers.


Author(s):  
Michael Schabacker ◽  
Nikoletta Szélig ◽  
Sándor Vajna

In [1] different process modeling methods were evaluated and a tri-process modeling tool [2] was developed. After that it is often the case that the recorded product development processes have to be optimized in this tool. Previous studies of the authors have described the stages of process optimization in detail [3]. One of these stages was realized in [4] with the BAPM method. It has shown that there is no suitable method for the realization of the stage of process optimization called Simultaneous Engineering in the research literature. The aim of this paper is to show one approach to realize Simultaneous Engineering by quantifying the degree of parallelization of documents. With the improved triangle it is possible to represent the relation between parallelization, resources and risk. This paper allows a quantified estimation of the change in the risk to be provided during the parallelization of the elements of a process. Companies applying the optimization approaches discussed above will be able to perform more efficiently and create more efficient product development projects.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (06) ◽  
pp. 1340024
Author(s):  
PAULO J. GOMES

Product development teams sustain the level of ambiguity in product development projects through product configuration and project planning decisions. In this paper, we represent these decisions in terms of earliness, specificity and contingency of front-end activities and test their impact on project performance. We propose that product novelty mediates the impact of configuration and project decisions on performance. Our hypotheses are tested using data from a sample of radical and incremental product development projects. The results support a positive relation between earliness and contingency of front-end activities and development performance for incremental projects. Radical projects benefit from early milestones set during project planning.


2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong-Sen Yan ◽  
Zheng Wang ◽  
Min Jiang

This paper deals with the quantitative modeling and planning of the product development process in concurrent engineering (CE). CE requires that product design and its related process design be carried out concurrently. Many existing CE models highlight the impact of the upstream design on the downstream design. While in our research, a quantitative model of the product development process in CE based on the network of product-process design activity pairs is presented to describe both the impact of the upstream product design on the downstream process design and the process design's ability of discovering the faults in the product design. Based on this model, a method is presented to determine the appropriate concurrency degree between the product and process design activities and estimate the mean duration of product-process design activity pair. Then an approach is proposed to solve the integrated optimization problem of both the allocation of resources and the planning of the product development process in CE. Its objective is to allocate the resources for the product development project reasonably to complete it before the due date, minimize its lead-time and keep the average resource utilization rate above a given level. Unlike other project scheduling problems with pre-determined numbers of the resources allocated for the project, in our research, the numbers of the resources allocated for the project are determined along with the project planning. To solve the problem, a branch-and-bound algorithm is proposed and a heuristic rule is introduced to improve its efficiency. The computational result of an example from an automobile factory shows the effectiveness of the algorithm.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-174
Author(s):  
Sonia Kherbachi ◽  
Qing Yang ◽  
Sher Zaman Khan

In global product development projects, coordinating complex technical communication among teams across time zones in the overlapping process is a fundamental challenge. To optimize a global product development organization to reduce the negative impact of time separation on coordination, this article presents an innovative approach to solve two key problems: how to quantify the coordination among distributed teams and how to identify efficient global product development organization. We build structural models to capture the coordination dependency strength among global product development teams from the time separation and overlapping process perspectives, employing the design structure matrix method. Then, we analyze the factors that influence synchronous and asynchronous communication due to time separation. We also apply the random walk method to identify a team similarity matrix, taking into account the direct and indirect dependency relationships among teams associated with their performed activities. Finally, we use the team similarity matrix as an input to a spectral clustering algorithm to identify the clustering strategy for the global product development organizational architecture, yielding and reinforcing several managerial insights, including how to analyze the coordination among global product development teams as well as how the offshoring costs impact the clustered organization.


Author(s):  
Cristian Iorga ◽  
Alain Desrochers

The expansion of the markets corroborated with product customization and short time to launch the product have led to new levels of competition among product development companies. To be successful in the globalization of the markets and to enable the evaluation and validation of products, companies have to develop methodologies focused on lifecycle analysis and reduction of product variation to obtain both quality and robustness of products. Keywords: Modeling, Evaluation, Validation, Design ProcessThis paper proposes a new design process methodology that unifies theoretical results of modeling stage and empirical findings obtained from the validation stage. The evaluations and validations of engineering design are very important and they have a high influence on product performances and their functionality, as well on the customer perceptions.Given that most companies maintain the confidentiality of their product development processes and that the existing literature does not provide more detailed aspects of this field, the proposed methodology will represent a technical and logistical support intended for students or engineers involved in academic as well as industrial projects.A generic methodology will be refined based on a new approach that will take into consideration the specification types (quantitative or qualitative), the design objectives and the product types: new/improved, structural/esthetic. Hence the new generic methodology will be composed of specific product validation algorithms taking into account the above considerations. At the end of this paper, the improvements provided by the proposed methodology into the design process will be shown in the context of the engineering student capstone projects at the Université de Sherbrooke.


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