Leveraging Design Process Related Intellectual Capital — A Key to Enhancing Enterprise Agility

The sustained improvement of Product Development Processes (PDPs) has long been the focus of research in manufacturing and more recently that of research in design as well. This is due in part to the key realization that a PDP constitutes not only a central component of the engineering effort but also a core business process. During the last decade, a strategic business approach for the effective management and use of corporate intellectual capital has emerged. This approach has come to be known as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and promises to further a holistic consideration of product design, emphasizing integration, interoperability, and sustainability throughout a product's lifecycle in order for an engineering enterprise to remain agile with respect to the constantly evolving demands of a global market. Intellectual capital, thus far, has been comprised mainly of product related knowledge and exploited mostly via the reusability and scalability of existing products through product platform and product family design. However, we strongly believe that focusing solely on product knowledge is not sufficient and limits agility to variant design (and adaptive design, to a limited extent). In order to effectively support the generation of entire portfolios of products (via derivative and original design), we believe that the design process should also be considered to constitute a crucial component of an engineering enterprise's intellectual capital. Hence, we propose a paradigm shift that is centered on leveraging design process knowledge derived from previous designs towards the design of entirely new products. Rather than proposing new technologies or standards under the 'PLM umbrella', in this chapter our objectives are: (1) to highlight design processes as key elements of an engineering enterprise's intellectual capital, and (2) to motivate fundamental research directions. In this chapter, an overview of the requirements

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