Project Management in Product Development

Abstract

The market requires that companies continuously reduce their product and process development time and costs, in order not to lose their competitive advantage on the global market. Short product and process development time in combination with low costs and achievement of required quality can be obtained only by integrating project management methods with concurrent engineering elements. Project management of orders combined with concurrent engineering elements allows for considerable reduction of development time, reduction of costs, and provides for a higher quality of order/product [1]. Order planning phase is very important in integrated product/process development. In the traditional product/process development, on average only 3% of total order development time is used for planning, while at the concurrent concept this time increases to about 20% [2]. The company which has decided for the integrated product/process development as a mode of its operation, first has to carry out organization and information redesign of its business process, as well as to make system and operation project management guidelines. The paper presents an example of project management implementation in a company, the emphasis being on the development of planning procedure and project management of orders, as well as design of a project dossier.