Tracking Product‐process Interactions: A Research Paradigm*

Abstract

To design (or redesign) a competitive product, it is imperative that both the sales and manufacturing cost implications are assessed in a structured way. That is, the interactive (multidimensional) aspects of manufacturing and marketing variables need to be positioned in a proper perspective so that the system impact of variation in one or more variables may be ascertained quickly. In this paper we show how some of the system‐related paradigms can be used as foundations for developing quantitative and qualitative models for tracking such interactive ímpacts. The emphasis is not on building complex mathematical models to solve specific problems but on providing a framework where system properties expressed as simple postulates can be used in an intelligent way to assess the impact of improvements in specific product‐process scenarios.

A Retrospective Look at Production and Operations Management Articles on New Product Development

“…However, QFD suffers from several limitations, including that it does not scale well and that it gives satisfactory, but not optimal, results. Chakravarty and Ghose (1993) proposed an alternative approach to map the cross-functional relationships. They drew on data envelopment analysis to construct an efficient frontier based on existing designs, and then used this frontier to design new products.…”

Customization: Impact on Product and Process Performance

“…As the number of parameters established by the customer increases in region 2 (Figure 2), the inter-dependencies among parameters become less manageable. This aspect has been emphasized in the literature related to House-of-Quality and product-process interactions (Hauser and Clausing 1988;Chakravarty and Ghose 1993;Bordley 1993). This difficulty leads to higher chances of design errors during the customization process.…”

“…The manufacturer adjusts the remaining parameters to deploy their own standard routings to ensure conformance quality. However, customization beyond a threshold makes it harder to manage product-process interactions and strains the capability of manufacturing processes (Chakravarty and Ghose 1993;Bordley 1993). Standardized routings developed for product families cannot accommodate the highly customized metallurgical specifications without sacrificing conformance quality.…”

“…The objective of our research is primarily to examine the efficacy of product customization in light of the complexity of the customization process. We investigate how customization affects the two key dimensions of quality: performance and conformance (Garvin 1987;Chakravarty and Ghose 1993). Specifically the following two questions are analyzed.…”