A framework for managing risks on concurrent engineering basis

Abstract Recently, risk management in product development processes has been regarded as an important issue by many manufacturers. Although many different approaches have been available for handling various risks occurring frequently at business lfevel such as in finance, there have been few studies that attempted to manage them at plant level. This paper introduces a new risk management framework (RMF) which will be ideal for managing risks in product development processes. The RMF uses both influencing dimensions matrix (IDM) to define the difficulty of a product development project under concurrent engineering environment, illustrates risk factors that have occurred or are to occur in the project, and computes the impact value of each risk factor, the probability of risk occurrences, and their degrees. Also, this framework suggests proper responding activities that to reduce or minimize such risk degrees and adapts a network model to determine the critical paths for establishing a successful development process on the basis of effectiveness. In this paper, we focus on a RMF structure for a systematic defense against various risk factors.