Impacts of Making Design Decision Sequence Explicit on NPD Projects in a Forest Machinery Company

The front-end of an NPD project is a challenging area due to lack of adequate information, limited time, multidisciplinary teams and concurrent engineering. In this kind of environment communication and knowledge sharing becomes critical. This paper introduces a method of mapping design decision sequence as used in an NPD project, which specifically addresses the challenges of front end product development. The objective of the paper is to present the empirical results of a case study conducted at a Finnish forest machinery company, analyzing the impact of making design decision sequence explicit by using a method of Product Structure-based Information Flow Modelling (PSIFM). The goal of PSIFM is to improve the management of NPD projects by supporting the shared understanding between different disciplines and reusing the existing design process knowledge.

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