Firms manufacturing highly innovative and complex products often rely on the expertise of their suppliers who provide critical components that enable core functionality of products. During the product design stage there is often considerable uncertainty about component production cost, and it is of interest to both the manufacturer and the supplier to enter into a collaborative relationship in order to reduce this uncertainty and the expected cost. Despite the bene…t, however, the supplier might be fearful of revealing his proprietary cost information and thus may be reluctant to fully collaborate. Building on the traditional frameworks of the newsvendor model and adverse selection, we investigate how information asymmetry and contracting strategies a¤ect collaboration outcomes. We compare contracts based on price and quantity, and …nd that the manufacturer may be better o ¤ committing to a price early (before the conclusion of product development) since this promotes full collaboration. However, delaying the contract o¤er can also be a viable strategy if (a) collaboration leads to a large decrease of expected production cost but not of cost uncertainty, and (b) large demand uncertainty exists. We also …nd that, paradoxically, e¤orts to reduce demand uncertainty and production lead time may hinder collaboration during product development. 1 1

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are considered as an engine for economic growth all over the world and especially for developing countries. During the past decade, new product development (NPD) has increasingly been recognized as a critical factor in ensuring the continued survival of SMEs. On the other hand, the rapid rate of market and technological changes has accelerated in the past decade, so this turbulent environment requires new methods and techniques to bring successful new products to the marketplace. Virtual team can be a solution to answer the requested demand. However, literature have shown no significant differences between traditional NPD and virtual NPD in general, whereas NPD in SME’s virtual team has not been systematically investigated in developing countries. This paper aims to bridge this gap by first reviewing the NPD and its relationship with virtuality and then identifies the critical factors of NPD in virtual teams. The statistical method was utilized to perform the required analysis of data from the survey. The results were achieved through factor analysis at the perspective of NPD in some Malaysian and Iranian manufacturing firms (N = 191). The 20 new product development factors were grouped into five higher level constructs. It gives valuable insight and guidelines, which hopefully will help managers of firms in developing countries to consider the main factors in NPD. Key words: Survey findings, new product development, factor analysis, virtual team.

Abstract not found

Given the crucial role of process modeling in product development (PD) project management research and practice, and the variety of models proposed in the literature, a survey of the PD process modeling literature is timely and valuable. In this work, we focus on the activity network-based process models that support PD project management and present a comprehensive survey of the literature published in the last decade. To organize our survey, we use a framework based on the

There are ever increasing pressures on companies to improve the quality of their products whilst reducing both costs and the time it takes to deliver products to customers. Traditional Concurrent Engineering approaches have been widely used by organisations to improve their business processes – resulting in reduced costs and shortened lead times. More recently, the idea of Three Dimensional Concurrent Engineering has been proposed: arguing for the parallel consideration of supply chain issues as well as those related to product and process. Three Dimensional Concurrent Engineering leads to a need for a supply chain design process which, in turn, requires tools to support the process. The research reported here was an early investigation into the feasibility of using axiomatic design theory to support a supply chain design process.

Customization requires not only an implementation of proper manufacturing systems but also a proper strategy regarding when firms should offer customized products and what the nature of customization should be. This paper questions 1) whether customization is better than no customization, and, if so, 2) what kind of customization strategy firms should adopt under competition. We find that customization is not optimal when the cost of soliciting customer preference information is sufficiently high. When competing firms choose to customize, we show that firms target only certain customer segments with customized products. We also find that the optimal customization strategy may require firms to offer only a few discrete product varieties. Despite the concern that customization may initiate price wars because customization reduces product differentiation, we find that customization does not escalate the price competition, because aggressive price competition exacerbates cannibalization. Although customers within the product line of a firm are charged higher prices, we show that on average customers are better off when firms adopt customization. However, unless the customization is quite cheap, when firms choose to customize, we find that firms cannot generate more profits than when firms offer only a single product.

For most #rms, new product development is the engine for growth and pro#tability. A #rm's new product success depends on its ability to manage the product development process in a way that employs scarce resources to achieve the goal of the #rm as well as the speci#c project's objectives. Simple and measurable performance metrics have been proposed and applied in order to monitor and compensate the development teams. In this paper, we develop a modeling framework in order to analyze the implications of setting managerial priorities for three commonly used new product performance metrics: 1) time-to-market, 2) product performance, and 3) total development cost. We model new product development as a product performance production' process that requires scarce development resources. Setting a target for development teams for each of these performance metrics can constrain this performance production process and thereby aect the other performance metrics. We model the constrained process a...

Engineering. The thesis is equivalent to 40 weeks of full time studies. Contact Information: Author(s):

Using recent empirical studies, we formulate a general framework of the hierarchical control processes needed for managing a new product development (NPD) project with a high technological uncertainty, under tight time constraints. Considering the project delivery time and resources as given, the project and its control are organized to solve the uncertainty in the new product specifications through repeated internal adjustments and interactions with customers. Our framework integrates the uncertainty regarding both the market requirements and technological uncertainties. They lead to the addition/deletion of design tasks, and to a stochastic solving time of the design tasks. The paper contributes to the area of NPD work organization models, and to the development of management-related NPD project control concepts, both areas presenting research opportunities according to Brown, Eisenhardt (1995).

In a time constrained new product development (NPD) situation, the project management is faced with the planning, co-ordination, and control of major technological and market changes. Until recently the modelling and analysis research assumed an early partial or complete product definition of the new product (see [6]). In this paper we introduce a general non-stationary markovian model that supports the dynamic achievement of the new product definition taking into account not only a highly dynamic market situation, but also a high technological uncertainty that affects both the number and the content of the design tasks involved in the NPD.