An Exploratory Study of Integrated Product Design and Development

Abstract

To accelerate the product design and development process, many companies have adopted a cross-functional, integrated development approach, widely known as concurrent engineering (CE), to designing a product and its associated processes. The purposes of this study are to examine (1) the effects of organizational and technological enablers on CE implementation, and (2) the effects of CE implementation on product design and development (PDD) performance and business performance. We based our analyses on survey data obtained from 382 U.S. companies in the computer and electronics industries (SIC 357 and 367), that have demonstrated a high degree of market uncertainty and innovation in recent years. Our results found strong evidences to support the links between CE enablers and CE implementation as well as CE implementation and PDD performance. Although the correlation between PDD performance and business performance was found statistically significant, the explanatory power of the analysis was limited. That leads us to believe that a company's business performance is influenced by a much more complex system than the one articulated in this study; but the practice of CE does have a positive, indirect effect on a company's business performance through better PDD performance.