Cost Management Practices in Collaborative Product Development Processes

In the concurrent and collaborative product development process, the realization of quantitative analysis and overall control of the development process management is the key and the difficulties in the current study. Through describes the concept and role of data maturity, a new methods to quantitative analysis and overall control of collaborative product development process based on the idea of data maturity was proposed in this paper. Base on the explanation of the theory of data maturity to control the process, the differences and relationship between data maturity and milestone was analyzed. The division method of data maturity level was discussed, and the corresponding relationship between each data maturity level and completion degree of the digital product model was illustrated also. In addition, the overall form of the product collaborative development process based on data maturity was provided. Finally, the detailed process between product structure design, process design and tooling design driven by each data maturity were explored, which realized the quantitative analysis and overall control of the product development process.

Ontology-based assembly design and information sharing for collaborative product development

Digital agility is a critical dynamic capability that is becoming increasingly important in the context of collaborative product development processes (PDPs). This paper aims to address the complexity of today's PDPs by considering various quality aspects including safety, environment, and the entire lifecycle, along with diverse dynamic capabilities such as digital agility and circular economy. The authors employed a semantic web methodology and created an ontology-based knowledge model. The proposed ontology uses Design for X techniques, circular economy, digital agility, and the semantic web under the PDP perspective to increase performance and cooperation between designers and the project team. To validate the ontology, measures for domain ontology evaluation have been used. The paper presents a detailed guide for ontology engineering and evaluation for collaborative smart PDP, which incorporates digital agility as a critical dynamic capability. The proposed ontology can help boost PDP performance and increase customer satisfaction.

In order to evaluate human and organization factors, an agent-based simulation approach is proposed, which simulates design process as a continuous interaction process of design agents and environment. Aiming at the characteristics of collaborative design work, the designer's agent model is constructed and collaboration process of the agent is described using Petri Nets. Simulation program is developed and experiments are conducted based on the agent model. The input parameters and evaluation criteria of the simulation are studied in detail. The elementary simulation result shows the accordance with the practical organization principles. The agent-based simulation provides a quantitative and dynamic method to evaluate and improve human and organization factors in collaborative product development process.

Process planning for collaborative product development with CD-DSM in optoelectronic enterprises

The internationalization of firms is a growing important phenomenon in the Economy. Thus, to face the new competitive challenges of globalized markets, industrial small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need to implement new organizational approaches to take on new challenges in international markets. Based on a case study, this chapter reviews the literature on internationalization theories. Drawing on the network-based approach and on the resource-based view of the firm, we examine how collaborative new product development processes played a fundamental role in the internationalization process of a SME using a relationship-based perspective. The featured case concerns to a successful ex-small technical textile firm that leveraged its competitive strategy, climbed up the value chain, and extended its international activities following a technology-based path.

In product development projects in a collaborative environment, it is not uncommon for professionals to work toward goals that do not result in successful, competitive products. One way of avoiding this problem is to employ objective indicators to represent the product's competitiveness and facilitate communication in the project team. This article proposes a Customer Satisfaction indicator for this purpose, which is especially useful for product improvement projects. This indicator makes it possible to (1) simulate Customer Satisfaction at a future date based on the modifications being proposed today and (2) verify how much the technical characteristics of a product actually contribute to Customer Satisfaction. It facilitates communication among professionals from different backgrounds, especially in a collaborative product development process. Practical applications are introduced, simulated and discussed.

Four important issues in Information System for Collaborative Product Development Process are discussed in this paper. They are process outsourcing, process orchestration, process dynamic change, and integration of process management with synchronized collaboration. A method of dynamic refining of process model is proposed to support hierarchical activity decomposition, therefore fulfils process outsourcing. Loose coupling message communication architecture based on JMS and web services technology is developed to orchestrate the cross-organizational product development processes. In order to treat process model changes in long-running product development processes, a process evolution methodology is discussed in this paper. At last, collaborative activity is presented to support synchronized collaborative work in asynchronous activity schedule in product development process.

The manufacturing environment rapidly changes in turbulence fashion. Digital manufacturing (DM) plays a significant role and one of the key strategies in setting up vision and strategic planning toward the knowledge based manufacturing. An approach of combining 3D machine vision (3D-MV) and an Additive Manufacturing (AM) may finally be finding its niche in manufacturing. This paper briefly overviews the integration of the 3D machine vision and AM in concurrent product and process development, the challenges and opportunities, the implementation of the 3D-MV and AM at POLMAN Bandung in accelerating product design and process development, and discusses a direct deployment of this approach on a real case from our industrial partners that have placed this as one of the very important and strategic approach in research as well as product/prototype development. The strategic aspects and needs of this combination approach in research, design and development are main concerns of the presentation.

How to reduce new product development time

This research focuses upon the optimization of the concurrency between upstream product design activity and downstream process design activities in the concurrent engineering product development pattern. First, a new model of concurrent product development process, i.e., the design activity group model, is built. In this model, the product and process design activities are carried out concurrently with the whole design process divided into several stages, every two of which are separated by a design review activity. The design review activities may lead to design iterations at a certain rate of probability. Therefore, a probability theory-based method is proposed to compute the mean duration of the design activity group and the mean workloads of all the design and review activities, with design iterations taken into consideration. Then, the problem of concurrency optimization is defined mathematically, whose objective is to minimize the total costs for delay of design activity group completion time and unnecessary design revision workloads. Our research proves that the cost function is convex with respect to the concurrent (or overlap) degree between design activities and that it must have a minimum value at a unique optimum point. Based on this property, a one-dimensional search algorithm that is exponentially converged is finally proposed for solving the problem.

The widespread adoption of computer-aided design (CAD) and manufacturing (CAM) tools has resulted in the acceleration of the product development process, reducing the time taken to design a product [46]. However, the product development process, for the most part, is still decentralized with the design and manufacturing reviews being performed independently, leading to differences between as-designed and as-manufactured component. A successful product needs to meet its specifications, while also being manufacturable. In general, the design engineer ensures that the product is able to function according to the specified requirements, while the manufacturing engineer gives feedback to the design engineer about its manufacturability. This iterative process is often time consuming, leading to longer product development times and higher costs. Recent researches in integrating design and manufacturing [24, 28, 46] have tried to reduce these differences and making the product development process easier and accessible to designers, who may not be manufacturing experts. In addition, there have been different efforts to enable a collaborative product development process and reduce the number of design iterations [8, 10, 41]. However, with the increase in complexity of designs, integrating the manufacturability analysis within the design environment provides an ideal solution to improve the product design process.

The combination of computer-aided tools for the support of planning and execution of product development processes opens new possibilities especially for the collaboration in virtual enterprises and globally distributed supply chains. The use of simulation tools for process analysis not only enables the enterprises to design optimised product development processes across company borders but can also form the basis for the execution of these processes. The support granted by product library and workflow-management functionalities ensures that planned processes are carried out in an effective way without struggling with the usual information management problems.The described approach of a continuous support of the design and execution of product development processes helps companies to face the challenges of a globalised world by using the opportunities that such a globalised world offers.Keywordsproduct development processessimulationdistributed designproduct data management

Based on the analysis of collaborative product development process, the overall task load model was established. Through analyzing the features of task iteration convergence and building the design capabilities constraint functions, the design capability reliability evaluation model was constructed to evaluate the conflict between task iteration and design capabilities for each design entity, and judge whether the design entities’ capability is capable or not to complete the design tasks on the condition of the task iteration. Based on the assessment results and combined iterative design structure matrix, the main factors which affecting the task iteration was analyzed and corresponding improvement measures were also proposed for the purpose of reducing task iteration frequency and optimizing the conflict processes. Finally, a case study was presented to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Concurrent engineering in small companies