Concurrent Product Development Process Research Articles

The use of a GERT based method to model concurrent product development processes

This paper proposes a time-computing model using the Graphical Evaluation and Review Technique (GERT) to analyse concurrent New Product Development (NPD) processes. The research presented here differs from previous work carried out on concurrent engineering. First, we conceptualise a concurrent NPD process using the GERT scheduling technique and derive a method of modelling the information and communication complexities within the process. Second, we extend previous research carried out on concurrent engineering and incorporate it within our model. Finally, we present an alternative method of analysing concurrent NPD process for both researchers and project managers alike. The GERT model developed in this paper was successfully employed at two NPD firms located in Ireland and Iran.

The effect of cost goal specificity and new product development process on cost reduction performance

Many firms that compete based on the development of new and innovative products have begun to adopt concurrent new product development (NPD) processes in which product design phases occur in a non-linear and iterative manner. While concurrent NPD processes increase flexibility and reduce time-to-market as compared to traditional sequential processes, concurrency increases task uncertainty since the product design process begins before all important product features and specifications have been established. Such changes can result in costly redesign and rework. Prior research suggests target costing, where product design teams are assigned specific cost goals, is an effective method of controlling costs in sequential NPD. Even so, it is unclear whether target costing will improve cost reduction performance when combined with a concurrent NPD process due to increased task uncertainty. We examine experimentally the ability of product design groups to achieve specific or general cost reduction goals under simulated sequential or concurrent NPD. We predict and find that the nature of the NPD process moderates the effect of specific cost reduction goals on actual cost reduction performance. While specific cost goals result in higher reductions in product cost than general cost goals under a sequential NPD process, specific goals are no better than general goals in motivating design groups to reduce product cost under a concurrent NPD process; thus, we demonstrate boundary conditions on the usefulness of target costing as a cost control method.

New Product Development: Impact of Project Characteristics and Development Practices on Performance

Concurrent product development process and integrated product development teams have emerged as the two dominant new product development (NPD) “best practices” in the literature. Yet empirical evidence of their impact on product development success remains inconclusive. This paper draws upon organizational information processing theory (OIPT) to explore how these two dominant NPD best practices and two key aspects of NPD project characteristics (i.e., project uncertainty and project complexity) directly and jointly affect the NPD performance. Contrary to the “best practice” literature, the analysis, based on 266 NPD projects from three industries (i.e., automotive, electronics, and machinery) across nine countries (i.e., Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the United States), found no evidence of any direct impact of process concurrency or team integration on overall NPD performance. Instead, there is evidence of negative impact of the interaction between project uncertainty and concurrent NPD process and positive impact of the interaction between project complexity and team integration on overall NPD performance. Moreover, the study found no evidence of any direct negative impact of project uncertainty or complexity on overall NPD performance as suggested in the literature, but found evidence of a direct positive relationship between project complexity and overall NPD performance.The practical implications of these results are significant. First, neither process concurrency nor team integration should be embraced universally as best practice. Second, process concurrency should be avoided in projects with high uncertainty (i.e., when working with unfamiliar product, market, or technology). Finally, team integration should be encouraged for complex product development projects. For a simple product a loosely integrated team or a more centralized decision process may work well. However, as project complexity increases, team integration becomes essential for improved product development. There is no one‐size‐fits‐all solution for managing NPD projects. The choice of a product development practice should be determined by the project characteristics.

VIRTUAL PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT WITHIN A FOURTH YEAR OPTION IN THE MECHANICAL ENGINEERING CURRICULUM

The Mechanical Engineering Department of École Polytechnique after experimenting for a number of years with a virtual environment option in the Aerospace Master Program, created a new design option in the fourth year of the Mechanical Engineering program. This option is built around a project carried out by a large team working over two semesters where a digital product definition including Product Data Management and Manufacturing Process Management technologies are currently used to foster a concurrent product development process. This orientation contains three courses and the project. A series of laboratory sessions have been developed in each course in order to familiarise the students with the virtual environment and also the various types of analysis that they will have to perform on the product being developed. Professors teaching the three courses participate in the project definition and the project assessment. This approach reinforces the various subjects’ knowledge and integrates it into a practical realm close to an industrial environment. The project assessment includes four reviews. A requirements review and a conceptual review are set in the first semester and a preliminary design review and a critical or detail design review in the second semester. At each review, the students prepare a technical report followed by an oral presentation to a jury composed of four professors of the option, engineers from industry and the professor coordinating the SAE Student Formula. At each review, the students have to evaluate the work completed by each participant to the project. This evaluation impacts on the individual assessment of the project. The vision for this project is to integrate practical building and test experiences by coupling the option courses with an already existing lab course in the last semester. A major part of this lab course is oriented for practical team training (3 - 4 students) on a given number of laboratory experiments. It is planned that some of these labs will be focused on the analysis and testing of sub-assemblies already designed and built during the project of the previous or the current year. This goal is in line with our CDIO (Conceive, Design, Implement, Operate) initiative which aims to include in the engineering curriculum a number of design, build and test experiences.

Application of Data Maturity in Product Development Process Control

In the concurrent and collaborative product development process, the realization of quantitative analysis and overall control of the development process management is the key and the difficulties in the current study. Through describes the concept and role of data maturity, a new methods to quantitative analysis and overall control of collaborative product development process based on the idea of data maturity was proposed in this paper. Base on the explanation of the theory of data maturity to control the process, the differences and relationship between data maturity and milestone was analyzed. The division method of data maturity level was discussed, and the corresponding relationship between each data maturity level and completion degree of the digital product model was illustrated also. In addition, the overall form of the product collaborative development process based on data maturity was provided. Finally, the detailed process between product structure design, process design and tooling design driven by each data maturity were explored, which realized the quantitative analysis and overall control of the product development process.

Computing Completion Time and Optimal Scheduling of Design Activities in Concurrent Product Development Process

This paper proposes a time-computing model and a scheduling method for shortening the completion time of product development under the given rework cost budget. As overlapping and iteration exist between or among design activities in concurrent product development, predictability and efficiency of the process deserve attention. By using the corresponding design structure matrix, the characteristics of information flow are obtained and applied to analysis of the dynamic behavior of the product development process. A time-computing model is set up to estimate the rework cost and completion time of each of the activities, between which both iteration and overlapping are observed. Through sequential quadratic programming, an optimization algorithm is developed for minimizing the development completion time under the constraint of the given rework cost budget. Our application results acquired from our experiments have verified the feasibility and validity of the approach.

Developing a universal numerical control machine based on an enterprise multilevel framework and its IPPMD reference map and methodology

Nowadays more manufacturing enterprises are requiring the adoption of a structured process to improve their practices in a product development project. Using an enterprise multilevel framework, this paper introduces an integrated product, process and manufacturing system development ( IPPMD) reference map and methodology to create a particular product development model and setting-up based on it a successful concurrent product development process that is independent of the enterprise industrial sector and focuses on specific issues such as: market opportunities, technological constraints, stakeholders’ interrelations and declared goals related to the enterprise strategies. Furthermore, a study case is presented following the IPPMD methodology, which is supported by a reference map as part of the enterprise multilevel framework, and starts with a project scope definition and moves forward to the establishment of a particular product development model for a specific project, in this case: the development of a universal numerical control (UNC) machine.

Introducing Templates for Sustainable Product Development

SummaryWe have previously developed a method for sustainable product development (MSPD) based on backcasting from basic sustainability principles. The MSPD informs investigations of product‐related social and ecological sustainability aspects throughout a concurrent engineering product development process. We here introduce “templates” for sustainable product development (TSPDs) as a complement. The idea is to help product development teams to arrive faster and more easily at an overview of the major sustainability challenges and opportunities of a product category in the early development phases. The idea is also to inform creative communication between top management, stakeholders, and product developers. We present this approach through an evaluation case study, in which the TSPDs were used for a sustainability assessment of televisions (TVs) at the Matsushita Electric Group. We study whether the TSPD approach has the ability to (1) help shift focus from gradual improvements of a selection of aspects in relation to past environmental performance of a product category to a focus on the remaining gap to a sustainable situation, (2) facilitate consensus among organizational levels about major sustainability challenges and potential solutions for a product category, and (3) facilitate continued dialogue with external sustainability experts, identifying improvements that are relevant for strategic sustainable development. Our findings indicate that the TSPD approach captures overall sustainability aspects of the life cycle of product categories and that it has the above abilities.

Research on DSM for Simulation of Concurrent Product Development Process

In this paper a simulation algorithm for concurrent product development process (CPDP) is presented based on Design Structure Matrix (DSM). An aggregate DSM is used to model the CPDP. To simulate the influence on the process of the time limit and the resource competition, the schedule and resource model are established. A method is also advanced to handle task delay. At last a case is used to validate the simulation algorithm and to show the influence on the process of task duration and resource.

TIME MODEL AND OPTIMIZATION METHOD IN CONCURRENT PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

A time computing model with its corresponding optimization method is presented for the overlapping and iteration between design activities in concurrent product development process. The design activity groups are divided into coupling and non-coupling activity blocks based on the programmed design structure matrix. According to the direction of information flow, rework time of each design activity caused by overlapping is calculated in turn. Then the time model of product development is formulated. Given cost constraint, the problem of shortest development time is transformed into constrained optimization problem, and a corresponding algorithm for this problem is proposed. The results of application example show that the time model and optimization method are effective.

Optimizing the Concurrency for a Group of Design Activities

This research focuses upon the optimization of the concurrency between upstream product design activity and downstream process design activities in the concurrent engineering product development pattern. First, a new model of concurrent product development process, i.e., the design activity group model, is built. In this model, the product and process design activities are carried out concurrently with the whole design process divided into several stages, every two of which are separated by a design review activity. The design review activities may lead to design iterations at a certain rate of probability. Therefore, a probability theory-based method is proposed to compute the mean duration of the design activity group and the mean workloads of all the design and review activities, with design iterations taken into consideration. Then, the problem of concurrency optimization is defined mathematically, whose objective is to minimize the total costs for delay of design activity group completion time and unnecessary design revision workloads. Our research proves that the cost function is convex with respect to the concurrent (or overlap) degree between design activities and that it must have a minimum value at a unique optimum point. Based on this property, a one-dimensional search algorithm that is exponentially converged is finally proposed for solving the problem.

A decision support system for product design in concurrent engineering

Compared with the traditional sequential design method, concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to integrate concurrent design of products and their related processes. One of the key factors to successfully implement concurrent engineering is information technology. In order to design a product and its manufacturing process simultaneously, information on product features, manufacturing requirements, and customer demands must be processed while the design is concurrently going on. There is an increased understanding of the importance of the correct decisions being made at the conceptual design and development stages that involve many complex evaluation and decision-making tasks. In order to promote the efficiency in concurrent product development, appropriate evaluation and decision tools need to be provided. In this paper, the characteristics of fuzzy, multi-stage evaluation and decision making in concurrent product development process are analyzed and a decision support system for product design in concurrent engineering is presented. An example is given to illustrate the application of the system.

A Constraint-driven Execution Plan for Maximizing Concurrency in Product Development

One of the major goals of Concurrent Product Development (CPD) is to shorten the design cycle time by increasing more task overlaps of the ensuing design activities. Increasing task or activity overlap often hinges on two timing questions (a) ‘‘When does the downstream activity require certain information from its upstream activities and (b) when will the required information on an activity be available for scheduling the next dependent task?’’ The paper discusses a constraint-driven execution plan to handle the concurrency during scheduling of various dependent tasks. This constraint-driven execution plan is designed to relieve the alignments of start and end points commonly encountered during scheduling of the concurrent tasks. It is not essential that an activity will start only when a dependent activity is fully finished. In constraint-driven execution plan, a task or an activity can be initiated as soon as the required information is available rather than after the completion of all the upstream activities dependent on it. The paper shows that if we follow this execution plan during a CPD process, concurrencies among the ensuing design activities can be maximized. The paper also discusses how this execution plan can be used in a context of a workflow management system (WfMS). Employing this plan, it is possible to easily transform most of the event-condition-action (ECA) rules-based workflow model–from its activity completion event-driven forms–into an information-constraint-satisfaction-driven forms. This execution plan, thus, enables an event-driven WfMs to support concurrency of tasks during product development and concurrent tasks’ scheduling.

How to reduce new product development time

When entering the global market the companies encounter several difficulties, the most important one being excessive time for new product development. This problem can be solved by transition from sequential engineering to concurrent engineering, (Concurrent Engineering Fundamentals, Integrated Product and Process Organization, Vol. I, Prentice Hall PTR, New Jersey, 1996; Concurr. Eng. Res. Appl. 9 (2001) 191). The article presents the principle of concurrent product development process. The market forces small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) to a transition from sequential to concurrent engineering and as team work is the basic element of the concurrent engineering, special attention is being paid to team and workgroup forming in the loops of concurrent product development process in an SME. The article does not deal with communication issues within a team and among teams. A survey of published works in the field of designing teams in big companies has revealed that in big companies a three-level team structure is recommended, as well as a workgroup, consisting of four basic teams. Analysis of the three-level team structure has led us to the conclusion that in SMEs a two-level team structure and a workgroup consisting of two basic teams should be preferred. The results of designing a two-level team structure and the project of transition to concurrent development of mini-loader are presented. Time and cost analysis results prove the justification of transition from sequential to concurrent product development.

Research on group decision support system for concurrent product development process

There are many complex evaluation and decision-making problems in concurrent product development process. In order to improve the efficiency of multi-discipline work team for concurrent product development. The evaluation and decision tools should be provided. In the paper, the characteristics of group decision during concurrent product development process are analyzed and a group decision support system (GDSS) with multi-agent structure is presented. The main functions and working principles of each agent are introduced in detail. The working process of this system and the implementation method of agent are also discussed. This GDSS has the characteristics of flexible structure and high adaptability and can offer the powerful support to concurrent product development.

A constraint satisfaction neural network and heuristic combined approach for concurrent activities scheduling

Scheduling activities in concurrent product development process is of great significance to shorten development lead time and minimize the cost. Moreover, it can eliminate the unnecessary redesign periods and guarantee that serial activities can be executed as concurrently as possible. This paper presents a constraint satisfaction neural network and heuristic combined approach for concurrent activities scheduling. In the combined approach, the neural network is used to obtain a feasible starting time of all the activities based on sequence constraints, the heuristic algorithm is used to obtain a feasible solution of the scheduling problem based on resource constraints. The feasible scheduling solution is obtained by a gradient optimization function. Simulations have shown that the proposed combined approach is efficient and feasible with respect to concurrent activities scheduling.

AN INTEGRATED MULTI-AGENT CSCW SYSTEM FOR CONCURRENT PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Product development capability is more and more important for an enterprise in a knowledge-based economic era. In the philosophy of concurrent engineering, product development should be carried out in a concurrent way. Computer support is necessary for Concurrent Product Development (CPD). As an excellent tool to meet complex needs, CSCW has been used in CPD. But nearly all CSCW systems that have been developed so far concentrate on a more or less narrow sub-field of cooperative work. Thus, the need of integrated CSCW applications are apparent. The agent is a suitable programming paradigm that can be used to meet the complex needs. In this paper, a P-PROCE (Process, Product, Resource, Organization, Control & Evaluation) model is introduced for CPD firstly. By categorizing the agents of the multi-agent system (MAS) into different types of agent according to P-PROCE model and offering a structure of MAS, the CPD is mapped to MAS. The cooperation among agents is very important for MAS. In the paper, a two-layer cooperation structure of MAS is proposed. In the macro layer, agent based workflow control the CPD process and in the micro layer the entity agents interact with each other directly to fulfill the task. The key issues of these two cooperation layers are discussed in the paper. Component based structure of agent and an implemented case are also provided in the paper.

Concurrent engineering in small companies

In 1991, attainment of independence in Slovenia caused a drastic decrease in the domestic market for Slovenian companies. The companies which did not adapt to the new market conditions were destined for ruin. In this time several smaller companies were established which could adapt to new market conditions more easily. When these companies entered the world market they encountered several difficulties such as excessive flow times for development of new products. After a survey of available literature had been made it was found that those problems could be solved by transforming sequential engineering to concurrent engineering. The article presents the principles of sequential and concurrent product development processes. The market forces small Slovenian companies to a transition from sequential to concurrent engineering and as team work is the basic element of the concurrent engineering, special attention has been paid to workgroups forming in the loops of concurrent product development process in small companies. A survey of published works in the field of planning teams in big companies has revealed that a three-level team structure is recommended in big companies. Analysis of the three-level structure has led us to the conclusion that a two-level team structure and matrix organisation should be preferred in small companies. Presented are the results of planning a two-level team structure and matrix organisation of a small Slovenian company which produces mini-loaders.

Scheduling approach for concurrent product development processes

A heuristic scheduling approach is proposed for the concurrent product development processes, in which some crucial parameters are determined using the genetic algorithm (GA). Scheduling concurrent activities is of great significance to shorten development lead-time and minimize costs, since it can eliminate unnecessary redesign periods and guarantee that serial activities can be executed as concurrently as possible. To ensure the optimal concurrent scheduling and the effective utilization of resources along with efficient delivery of information, some key factors such as time order, information, resources, lead-time and overlapping time of activities, which enable concurrent activities to be executed successfully, are taken into account. Their weighting factors are fixed by the GA. In addition, the scheduling module includes role allocation and feedback revision. A simulation example, which is part of an aircraft product development process, shows the feasibility of the algorithm.

Establishing Concordance within Concurrent Engineering Teams

This paper describes how collocated teams can be analysed using process modelling and analysis (of organisational and management issues) to achieve a culture of concordance or mutual agreement between different parties within CE (product develop ment) teams. The benefits of teams are described, in particular, the need to create a collaborative environment. After establishing the need for analysis of such teams a process modelling and analysis methodology is described. The methodology attempts to address the issues concerned within CE teams from a process perspective. The methodology and supporting tools hence act as an aid for managers in the organisation and management of the Concurrent New Product Development process and CE teams. A case study of a domestic appliance manufacturer developing a new product using a collocated product development team is described to verify the benefits of collocation, and process modelling and analysis. The issues that emerge from this type of approach to improving the performance of CE teams and product development management are discussed. The paper ends by proposing that the main factors contributing to the suc cess of this approach (to improve the culture and operations of CE teams in terms of achieving concordance) are: commitment from top management, participation of both intra- and inter-organisational members, integration of organisation and technology, and building rela tionships between the active players.