An activity model of the product development process

Abstract

The inclusion of certain activities in the product development process (PDP) and their efficient execution have been identified as important factors for new product success. It is therefore important to be able to identify both what activities are present in a particular PDP and what activities should be present. The work reported in the present paper arose from the need to identify these activities as part of a method to evaluate the effectiveness of a company's PDP. Successful application of co-ordination processes, such as scheduling, resource allocation and concurrent engineering, also depends on having a complete representation of the PDP activities. The requirements that a model of the PDP activities should satisfy are identified in the paper. Existing models are reviewed, but none fully meets these requirements. A new generic model of PDP activities has been developed using the IDEF0 structure to derive a set of 18 generic elements against which companies can map their own PDP activities. This model is presented in detail, the results of tests in a number of manufacturing companies are described, and comparisons are made with a number of existing models. The 18 generic elements are found to be sufficient to represent all the test cases.