Toward robust concurrent product development across the supply chain: a risk assessment framework

Abstract

ABSTRACTStrategic relationships with key suppliers are required for sustaining growth and creating competitive product development advantage. Managing key partners and suppliers who have a significant role in the design of their product’s major subsystems, and the increased risk that they introduce into the product development process is a key activity that is crucial to their successful integration. The common challenges faced by product integrators and suppliers during concurrent product development highlight the need for framework that allows integrators and suppliers to effectively design systems and subsystems concurrently and robustly. In this work, metrics are developed to quantitatively assess risk from supplier interactions. This is accomplished by quantifying the relative importance, the degree of customisation and the degree of coupling at the level of the engineering metrics, of the individual supplier subsystems and at the project-level. With these metrics, Intra-Supplier, Inter-Supplier and Inter-Projects risks can be assessed. The detailed development of these metrics, as well as their application to the development of a monochrome multi-functional printer to demonstrate the utility of the assessment framework is presented in this paper.