This paper is a review of research in product development, which we define as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale. Our review is broad, encompassing work in the academic fields of marketing, operations management, and engineering design. The value of this breadth is in conveying the shape of the entire research landscape. We focus on product development projects within a single firm. We also devote our attention to the development of physical goods, although much of the work we describe applies to products of all kinds. We look inside the “black box ” of product development at the fundamental decisions that are made by intention or default. In doing so, we adopt the perspective of product development as a deliberate business process involving hundreds of decisions, many of which can be usefully supported by knowledge and tools. We contrast this approach to prior reviews of the literature, which tend to examine the importance of environmental and contextual variables, such as market growth rate, the competitive environment, or the level of top-management support.

Abstract—Understanding the communication process in product development organizations has been recognized as a key element to improve product development performance. It is particularly interesting to study information exchanges in geographically distributed product development teams because of the highly interdependent nature of design organizations. Additionally, the use of electronic-based communication media has changed how development teams communicate. By studying the way product development teams use various communication media (face-to-face, telephone, and e-mail), we assess how the process of exchanging technical information is influenced by factors such as geographic dispersion, organizational bonds, and degree of team interdependence. We present a model that allows us to formulate several hypotheses about how these factors influence both communication frequency and media choice. We use empirical evidence from the telecommunications industry to test our hypotheses. We confirm previous results about the obstructive influence of distance on technical communication. However, we found that such negative effects may be mitigated by other factors such as the recognizing of highly interdependent team members, the existence of strong organizational bonds, and the use of electronic communication media. Index Terms—Electronic-based communication, geographically distributed product development, media use, organizational bonds, team interdependence, technical communication. I.

Increasingly shorter product life cycles impel rms to design, develop, and market more products in less time than ever before. Overlapping of design and development stages is commonly regarded as the most promising strategy to reduce product development times. However, overlapping typically requires additional resources and can be costly. Our research addresses the trade-o between product development time and costs and introduces an algorithm to determine an appropriate overlapping strategy under di erent scenarios. The methodology developed was successfully employed at Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International. 1.

Abstract—This paper presents a process modeling and analysis technique for managing complex design projects using advanced simulation. The model computes the probability distribution of lead time in a stochastic, resource-constrained project network where iterations take place among sequential, parallel, and overlapped tasks. The model uses the design structure matrix representation to capture the information flows between tasks. We use a simulation-based analysis to account for many realistic aspects of design process behavior which were not possible in previous analytical models. We propose a heuristic for the stochastic, resource-constrained project scheduling problem in an iterative project network. The model can be used for better project planning and control by identifying leverage points for process improvements, and for evaluating alternative planning and execution strategies. An industrial example is provided to illustrate the utility of the model. Index Terms—Design iteration, design structure matrix, process modeling, project management, project simulation.

Abstract—To gain competitive leverage, firms that design and develop complex products seek to increase the efficiency and predictability of their development processes. Process improvement is facilitated by the development and use of models that account for and illuminate important characteristics of the process. Iteration is a fundamental but often unaddressed feature of product development (PD) processes. Its impact is mediated by the architecture of a process, i.e., its constituent activities and their interactions. This paper integrates several important characteristics of PD processes into a single model, highlighting the effects of varying process architecture. The PD process is modeled as a network of activities that exchange deliverables. Each activity has an uncertain duration and cost, an improvement curve, and risks of rework based on changes in its inputs. A work policy governs the timing of activity execution and deliverable exchange (and thus the amount of activity concurrency). The model is analyzed via simulation, which outputs sample cost and schedule outcome distributions. Varying the process architecture input varies the output distributions. Each distribution is used with a target and an impact function to determine a risk factor. Alternative process architectures are compared, revealing opportunities to trade cost and schedule risk. Example results and applications are shown for an industrial process, the preliminary design of an uninhabited combat aerial vehicle. The model yields and reinforces several managerial insights, including: how rework cascades through a PD process, trading off cost and schedule risk, interface criticality, and occasions for iterative overlapping. Index Terms—Activity network, budgeting, cycle time, design iteration, design structure matrix, engineering design management, process architecture, process modeling, process structure, product development, rework, risk management.

Abstract—Many firms expend a great amount of effort to increase the customer value of their product development (PD) processes. Yet, in PD, determining how and when value is added is problematic. The goal of a PD process is to produce a product “recipe ” that satisfies requirements. Design work is done both to specify the recipe in increasing detail and to verify that it does in fact conform to requirements. As design work proceeds, certainty increases surrounding the ability of the evolving product design (including its production process) to be the final product recipe (i.e., technical performance risk decreases). The goal of this paper is to advance the theory and practice of evaluating progress and added customer value in PD. The paper proposes that making progress and adding customer value in PD equate with producing useful information that reduces performance risk. The paper also contributes a methodology—the risk value method—that integrates current approaches such as technical performance measure tracking charts and risk reduction profiles. The methods are demonstrated with an industrial example of an uninhabited combat aerial vehicle. Index Terms—Lean, performance measurement, product development, project management, risk management, systems engineering, value stream. I.

This paper provides a definition of assembly modeling and lists many ways that important aspects of mechanical assembly can be modeled so as to improve design and manufacturing of discrete part products. Assembly modeling is divided into two categories ("small " and "large"), the former concentrating on single part-pair relations while the latter includes sets of parts and system issues such as tolerance propagation, product architecture, mixed-model manufacturing, logistics, and so on. Both nominal and varied (i.e., off-nominal) assemblies are included, using a consistent mathematical modeling base. A case is made that assembly models can be an important integrating factor in product development and manufacturing. Acknowledgments: This paper was prepared with support from ONR Grant N00014-94-1-0655, ARPA/WL/MTI Contract F33615-94-C-4428, and the

Schedule risk is an important category of risk in complex system product development. This paper presents a framework that facilitates understanding schedule risk from a systems perspective. Research findings from literature and a Delphi-type survey of experienced product development managers and system engineers at a major aerospace company are synthesized into a framework characterizing sources of schedule uncertainty. The framework includes not only key uncertainty drivers but also the hypothesized or theorized relationships between them. Since risk is more than just uncertainty, consequences of schedule overruns and of schedule uncertainty itself are also discussed. This research contributes a more comprehensive, systems view to the studies of product development and risk management and to the practice of both in industry. The paper also examines potential paths for future

Abstract: This paper deals with the quantitative modeling and planning of the product development process in concurrent engineering (CE). CE requires that product design and its related process design be carried out concurrently. Many existing CE models highlight the impact of the upstream design on the downstream design. While in our research,a quantitative model of the product development process in CE based on the network of product–process design activity pairs is presented to describe both the impact of the upstream product design on the downstream process design and the process design’s ability of discovering the faults in the product design. Based on this model,a method is presented to determine the appropriate concurrency degree between the product and process design activities and estimate the mean duration of product–process design activity pair. Then an approach is proposed to solve the integrated optimization problem of both the allocation of resources and the planning of the product development process in CE. Its objective is to allocate the resources for the product development project reasonably to complete it before the due date,minimize its lead-time and keep the average resource utilization rate above a given level.

Successfully implementing concurrent development to reduce cycle time has proven difficult due to unanticipated interactions of process constraints and managerial decision making. We develop a dynamic project model that explicitly models these interactions to investigate the causes of the "90 % syndrome, " a common form of schedule failure in concurrent development. We find that increasing concurrence and the common propensity of workers to conceal required changes from other development team members aggravate the syndrome and degrade schedule performance. We explore iteration management policies to improve performance in concurrent development projects. 1.