Numerical Evaluation of Product Development Processes

Abstract

The management of new product development (NPD) processes is a continual challenge facing organizations that develop complex, innovative products. While market trends are forcing shorter product development times in order to meet time-to-market (TTM) goals, companies are trying to develop mechanisms to streamline their NPD processes. One approach that has provided much success towards achieving shorter TTM is concurrent engineering (Winner et al., 1988; Clark and Fujimoto, 1991; Blackburn, 1991; Wheelwright and Clark, 1992; Smith and Reinersten, 1991). Concurrent engineering (CE) can broadly be defined as the integration of inter-related functions at the outset of the product development process in order to minimize risk and reduce effort downstream in the process, and to better meet customers’ needs (Winner et al., 1988). Multi-functional teams, concurrency of product/process development, integration tools, information technologies, and process coordination are among the elements that enable CE to improve the performance of the product development process (Blackburn, 1991). The traditional NPD process suffers many setbacks. This process evolves in a sequential fashion, where phases follow one another serially, each one dominated by a single functional role. There is little or no crosscommunication among various functions, and information generated from one activity gets handed off to the next only after its completion. The commonly encountered problems with this type of process are increased downstream effort, process span time, i.e., the start to finish time of the process, and costs.