Design chain management: bridging the gap between engineering and management

Abstract

Because of economic globalization, modern product devel-opment has become greatly dependent on effectivelyleveraging external resources with customers, suppliers,technology providers, and business partners by means ofinter-organizational collaborations. Consequently, supplychain management has received considerable attention, withstudied that have concentrated on sales forecasting, produc-tion planning, scheduling, and logistics. Few studies haveexplored global distributed product design, especially fromeither the engineering or management perspectives.A design chain is a series of activates bound together toadd and transform information required to realize a finaldesign.EppingerandUlrich(2004)proposedfivemainactiv-ities to describe design chains: planning, concept develop-ment, system-level design, detailed design, and testing andrefinement. They further identified the elements of theseactivitiesinthefunctionalareasofmarketing,designing,andmanufacturing.Distributed decision making plays an important role indesign chain management for modern product development.