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

Research for reduced lead time and cost in concurrent process development (CPD) becomes crucial in new work organizations. Today, the concurrent processes involve more and more activities and work groups which must be efficiently coordinated. In this article, the authors propose a framework for structuring concurrent activities in order to improve the global performance (lead time, workload, risks, etc.). Many research works aim at proposing methods for management and control of concurrent development activities, but these methods are often 'isolated' and specific to an activity. There is no global solution that covers the entire development process and the set of related management and organizational activities. In this article, the authors used the SEI's (Software Engineering Institute) CMM (Capability Maturity Model) as a guideline to define an approach for the management and the control of a set of concurrent development activities. According to the CMM levels, the proposed approach is decomposed into four improvement steps that direct the organization's focus to manage its organizational development process. The first step applies basic project management methods to decompose and to schedule a process into several work groups. The second step addresses activities such as controlling the size of the obtained work groups, and characterizing each actor in a group. In the third step, a model based on the work transformation matrix (WTM) is proposed for the performance estimation of an organization. The last level aims at continually optimizing the organizational processes. For this purpose, models for sequential and parallel execution of processes are proposed and compared.

Section: Frame Of Application and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing and Organizing Concurrent Processes According to the CMM Levels

David

Idelmerfaa

Richard

2005

“…Concurrency and simultaneity are the major force of Concurrent Engineering (CE). Some researchers [27][28][29] attempted to analyze the concurrencies of design activities for optimum CE planning. Hu et al [28] employed a 'Concurrency index' to measure the coupling complexity between design activities based on the measure of concurrency (MOC) theory advanced by Prasad [30].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Dynamic Planning Approach for New Product Development

Luh

2009

This paper presents a quantifying and reordering method for new product development based on the concurrent engineering concept. We propose to establish a fuzzy design structure matrix (FDSM) by quantifying the information flow of activity factors of new product development and employing the fuzzy clustering method. Utilizing the proposed partition and tearing algorithm to reorder matrixes, we can realize deeply the inner hierarchy workings of concurrent engineering in the new product development process. The purpose of this paper is to develop a dynamic planning method that is innovative, efficient and flexible for new product development by using the concurrent design concept and FDSM analysis. It ultimately helpful to designers and managers to grasp the interactive information flow between each of the activity factors for planning an optimum design process in new product development. One case study is employed to illustrate this method and the result validates that it can reduce the iterations of design process and shorten the product development time.Key Words: new product development (NPD), concurrent engineering (CE), fuzzy design structure matrix (FDSM), dynamic planning method.

“…To the best of our knowledge, existing studies on the coordination of GPD teams do not take into account an important situation-such teams work in the overlapping process, which is one of the typical features of PD projects for accelerating the schedule. Hu et al (2003) have approached overlapping as an information constraint-driven process planning to relax the time restrictions on the information constraints. We extend this model in the situation of virtual teams to model the mapping between process and organizational units.…”

Section: Coordination and Communication Challenges In Gpd Projectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kherbachi

Yang

Khan

2020

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.