TRACKING PRODUCT-PROCESS INTERACTIONS: A RESEARCH PARADIGM*

To design (or redesign) a competitive product, it is imperative that both the sales and manufacturing cost implications are assessed in a structured way. That is, the interactive (multidimensional) aspects of manufacturing and marketing variables need to be positioned in a proper perspective so that the system impact of variation in one or more variables may be ascertained quickly. In this paper we show how some of the system-related paradigms can be used as foundations for developing quantitative and qualitative models for tracking such interactive impacts. The emphasis is not on building complex mathematical models to solve specific problems but on providing a framework where system properties expressed as simple postulates can be used in an intelligent way to assess the impact of improvements in specific product-process scenarios.

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