Global Product Development Projects Research Articles

Analyzing Interrelationships and Prioritizing Performance Indicators in Global Product Development: Application in the Chinese Renewable Energy Sector

Today’s global business landscape and intense market competition have heightened the significance of global product development (GPD) practices, making it necessary for organizations to evaluate GPD projects for sustained success. Existing research has primarily focused on independent and tangible performance metrics, neglecting their interdependencies and intangible nature in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, this study seeks to enhance the understanding of GPD performance by establishing a more sophisticated assessment approach. A hybrid decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) and analytical network process (ANP) method, known as DANP, was employed to determine the importance of evaluation metrics and their relationships. This research stands out by integrating financial, quality, time, environmental, and capability dimensions, along with their respective indicators, and presenting their interrelationships and priority weights for evaluating GPD projects. The proposed framework was validated through an in-depth case investigation conducted with a Chinese sustainable energy solutions company, involving extensive discussions with decision-makers. The results indicate that technological, innovation, and environmental indicators are the most critical metrics. The influential network relation map (INRM) derived from these findings offers practical recommendations to enhance GPD project performance, catering to policymakers and researchers in both managerial and theoretical contexts.

A structured approach to measuring and optimizing the organizational architecture in global product development projects

In global product development projects, coordinating complex technical communication among teams across time zones in the overlapping process is a fundamental challenge. To optimize a global product development organization to reduce the negative impact of time separation on coordination, this article presents an innovative approach to solve two key problems: how to quantify the coordination among distributed teams and how to identify efficient global product development organization. We build structural models to capture the coordination dependency strength among global product development teams from the time separation and overlapping process perspectives, employing the design structure matrix method. Then, we analyze the factors that influence synchronous and asynchronous communication due to time separation. We also apply the random walk method to identify a team similarity matrix, taking into account the direct and indirect dependency relationships among teams associated with their performed activities. Finally, we use the team similarity matrix as an input to a spectral clustering algorithm to identify the clustering strategy for the global product development organizational architecture, yielding and reinforcing several managerial insights, including how to analyze the coordination among global product development teams as well as how the offshoring costs impact the clustered organization.

Global product development projects: measuring performance and monitoring the risks

This article investigates the development and application of key performance indicators for global product development. Two in-depth, longitudinal case studies with multinational Danish manufacturing companies were conducted, and highlight how key performance indicators, typically used for collocated, cross-functional product development, do not provide the predictive insight required to avoid the additional risks encountered in the global product development environment. Grounded in the case study results and building on established methodologies in performance measurement literature, a framework was developed and validated in two additional Danish companies to support project managers to develop: preventive indicators, which support the avoidance of identified risks, and outcome indicators, which support the measurement towards the attainment of project objectives. The study is unique as it is one of the very few longitudinal studies of engineering design activities in a global context, providing the in-depth contextual understanding towards key risks and their influence on performance; an important step to support researchers and practitioners with the development of preventive measures.

Predicting Technical Communication in Global Product Development Projects Related Change Propagation

Technical communication is a key feature in Global Product Development (GPD) project to coordinate geographically distributed change management process due to a new functionality requirement or technology. Design Structure Matrix (DSM) and Multi-Domain Matrix (MDM) models are effective approaches for predicting technical communication and change propagation, optimizing GPD organization, and reducing change complexity. This paper presents the involvement degree matrix with the notion of gain factors among distributed teams to explore the factors influencing communication frequency in GPD. Further, this paper proposes a method to measure the combined change likelihood matrix based on numerical change propagation paths order, which extends previous change propagation algorithms. Finally, an industrial example is provided to illustrate the proposed models of predicting technical communication related to product ’s change . Results provide an integrated managerial insight to reflect how change propagation can impact the technical communication among team’s organization.

A Strong Foundation for Global Product Development (GPD): Set Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE), TRIZ, and Customer Value Proposition (CVP)

The rising best practice in product development utilizes a highly distributed and networked development process facilitated by a fully digital product development system. The impacts of globalization have begun on the practice of product development across a broader range of service and manufacturing industries. Organizations are utilizing skilled labors spread around the world to develop products in a collaborative manner. Best practice in product development (PD) is now rapidly migrating from local, cross-functional collaboration to a mode of global collaboration. Global product development (GPD) therefore represents a major transformation for business. However, there are certain limitations of the Global product development (GPD). The problems of new product developers are compounded due to the complexity of the products and great amount of software that is embedded in many products. The non-physical nature of software systems, where intuition, experience and judgment of experts plays more important role than quantitative and measurable metrics of the traditional engineering world, increases the complexity for the global product developers.The objective of this paper is to present frameworks that can help companies addressvarious strategic and tactical issues when considering adoption of GPD combining TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem solving), Customer value Proposition (CVP), and Set Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE) pioneered by Toyota. Set Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE) as a process for developing new products has started gaining traction for global product development. However, GPD projects are finding it difficult to adapt to SBCE process where time spent in the early phases of development typically is more. We propose in this paper how TRIZ & CVP based SBCE framework will make the GPD projects efficient, more robust and faster in many different GPD scenarios.Further it is proposed that principles of SBCE as practiced by Toyota Motors are natural fit for Global Product Development. However, the SBCE principles of strategic value research and alignment, map the design space, create and explore multiple concepts in parallel, integration by intersection, and establishing feasibility before commitment, need a set of tools and techniques to create an evolving picture of the situation at a particular point of time for all stakeholders in the process of development. The TRIZ & CVP based SBCE framework specifically takes care of information complexity, structural complexity, decision complexity, organization complexity& strategic value, and customer value for product of the GPD projects. TRIZ concepts of ideality, functionality, resources and contradictions elimination are used to come up with inventive solutions to sub-system functionality. TRIZ is used to generate a set of alternatives or possible solutions to various sub-systems to be made in the design space. The number of alternatives reduces gradually as the project is executed and more clarity about the components emerges. However, the goal of SBCE is to keep the alternatives till as late as possible. TRIZ helps in creating alternatives maintaining this picture and keeping all the alternatives during the whole life cycle of the project. Further the three major types of the customer value i.e. all benefits, favorable points of differences, and resonating focus and various customer value equations are added in SBCE to quantify the absolute component of value.

Multi-Domain Matrix As A Framework For Global Product Development Project Process

The global product development (GPD) project is complex and there is a need to integrate a specific communication process among teams involved in the project. In each stage of a GPD project, effective and efficient communication becomes a core issue. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a multi-domain structure matrix (MDM) enables the systematic identification of interdependencies, explores the teams communication process in GPD. This paper presents a tool to identify efficient communication process map and technical communication for each function of the overall project. The outcomes of this process are identifying teams’ communication process as an efficiency requirement for a GPD project, and MDM analysis as a methodology of managing complex process structure.

Identifying and managing coordination complexity in global product development project

The complexity of communication and coordination stemming from teams distributed across geographic locations and time zones is a fundamental feature of the global product development (GPD) project. The GPD project is also a complex web of interactions involving many overlapped activities and interdependent components. In order to manage coordination complexity, this paper presents a systematic method for identifying and measuring coordination drivers and coordination barriers in GPD projects. For characterizing coordination drivers, this paper builds quantitative models to measure dependency strengths related to product features and overlapped processes based on Multi-Domain Matrix (MDM) and Design Structure Matrix (DSM). For characterizing coordination barriers, the concepts of daily overlapping working hours ratio and relative spatial distance between GPD teams are presented for modeling dependency strengths related to temporal separation and spatial distance. Further, this paper proposes a new dependency rating scheme of organization DSM to evaluate the integrated coordinative dependency strength (ICDS). A two-stage clustering criteria minimizing the total coordination cost is used to reduce complexity of GPD organization. An industrial example is provided to illustrate the proposed models. Optimization results provide a more integrated managerial insight for evaluating ICDS and reducing total coordination cost.

Communication practices in global product development projects of Brazilian multinational firms

RESUMO As praticas de comunicacao em projetos globais de desenvolvimento de produtos em multinacionais brasileiras O objetivo da investigacao aqui relatada foi mapear as praticas de comunicacao aplicadas aos projetos globais de desenvolvimento de produtos de empresas multinacionais brasileiras e analisar se essas praticas variam de acordo com algumas caracteristicas dos projetos. Trata-se de um estudo de natureza exploratoria, cujo metodo de pesquisa foi o estudo de casos multiplos. Os resultados permitiram verificar que a frequencia da comunicacao nos projetos globais diminui com a distância, o que dificulta o controle e a coordenacao das equipes. No entanto, por si so a distância, embora imponha desafios adicionais, nao causa necessariamente problemas de comunicacao, pois pode ser contornada pelo apoio das ferramentas eletronicas de comunicacao. O estudo permitiu concluir, tambem, que o uso das praticas de comunicacao, bem como a importância dada a elas variam em funcao de algumas caracteristicas dos projetos, incluindo o tipo de projeto, os estagios do ciclo de vida, o nivel de complexidade e os arranjos integrativos utilizados no desenvolvimento dos produtos. Apesar de ter sido possivel identificar tais variacoes, observou-se que as praticas nao ocorrem de forma padronizada nos projetos; ao contrario, sao desenvolvidas de maneira improvisada e circunstancial e nao contam com um planejamento especifico no inicio do projeto.