Dynamic product development

Time-to-market has become the most critical factor in the success or failure of any new product introduction, particularly in today's increasingly global economy. The quest for speed is nothing new, but the technologies available, and the manner in which they can be applied, are constantly evolving. In this paper a new quantitative process model for product development is presented, which focuses on the representation of design iterations and their effects on the total product development process. The relations between the individual process steps are represented in design structure matrices and separated into dependent, independent and interdependent processes. By introduction of activity duration and transition probabilities for each process step and by application of the z-transform a quantitative model for coupled processes is created. This model is called Dynamic Product Development because it allows dynamic coupling of all product development functions. The resulting model is examined by analysis methods of discrete dynamic systems for its timing behavior. Probability distribution, expected value and variance of the lead time as well as sensitivities concerning individual development steps are determined. On the basis of a state space representation further participation factors and dominant modes are determined. The results supply the possibility for analyzing complex dependencies and time reduction of development process steps and provide a decision support tool for the product development process.