INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING DESIGN ICED 97 TAMPERE, AUGUST 19 - 21, 1997 REDUCING DESIGN CYCLE TIME AND COST THROUGH PROCESS RESEQUENCING

In todayOs competitive environment, companies are under enormous pressure to reduce thetime and cost of their design cycle. One method for reducing both time and cost is todevelop an understanding of the flow of the design processes and the effects of the iterativesubcycles that are found in complex design projects. Once these aspects are understood,the design manager can make decisions that take advantage of decomposition, concurrentengineering, and parallel processing techniques to reduce the total time and the total cost ofthe design cycle. One software tool that can aid in this decision-making process is theDesign ManagerOs Aid for Intelligent Decomposition (DeMAID).The DeMAID software minimizes the feedback couplings that create iterative subcycles,groups processes into iterative subcycles, and decomposes the subcycles into a hierarchicalstructure. The real benefits of producing the best design in the least time and at a minimumcost are obtained from sequencing the processes in the subcycles.