Improving the Quality of Information Flows in the Backend of a Product Development Process: a Case Study

Abstract

Considerable research has gone into designing effective product development processes. This, coupled with the increasing need for products that are able to deliver reliable, complex functionality with a high degree of innovation, presents a major challenge to modern day industries in the business of developing products. In order to incorporate relevant field experience in the design and manufacturing of new products, increasingly detailed information needs to be retrieved from the market in a very short amount of time. In one particular consumer electronics industry, business process models describing the information flow in the backend of the product development process indicated massive data loss and also serious data quality degradation. This paper attempts to show how such losses can be mitigated and also proposes a business model that can adequately capture information of a higher quality and in a more structured manner. The end result will be a product development process that provides better feedback on current product performance and is more responsive to future market needs. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.