(A) hybrid reengineering approach for accelerating a product development process

Abstract

As the life cycle of a product is getting shorter, the timely introduction of new products is becoming invaluable to most manufacturing companies. It requires them to make the lead time of product development ever shorter. In an intense competition, this is a critical measure of the success of manufacturing companies since their competitiveness depends on a fast responsiveness to the rapid change of customer demands. However, it is not easy to reduce the lead time of the product development because the product development (PD) process is a complex and unstructured one. The PD process has iterative, uncertain, evolutionary, and cooperative aspects, unlike business processes and manufacturing processes. Many studies have focused on reengineering the PD process to shorten the lead time. What seems to be lacking, however, is the systematic reengineering framework that helps to implement the reengineering effectively. The following issues should be considered together for a systematic reengineering: (1) How do we represent the complex PD process that is composed of many interrelated activities ?; (2) How do we estimate its lead time ?; and (3) What are the guidelines for reducing it ? and how do we reduce it effectively ? First, implementing the reengineering of the PD process demands on appropriate and logical activity model that covers from an abstract level to a detailed level. It also requires an appropriate modeling frame of the PD process in order to capture its characteristics well. Second, it is necessary to provide the method that can analyze the lead time of complex PD process since it is critical in evaluating the reengineering work. For this, it requires the makespan estimation methods of interrelated activities and the lead time estimation method of the overall process that reflect characteristics of the PD process well. Finally, in order to shorten the lead time of the PD process effectively, it is necessary to guide the reengineering in two aspects: q...