INTRODUCTION TO PLANNING AND INTEGRATION OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

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INTRODUCTION

Overview

Today’s market is characterized by keen international competition, increasingly complex products, and an extremely high innovation dynamic. Parallel to the shortening of innovation cycles, the life cycles of products and the time until investments pay off are decreasing.

Thus, time is presently the most challenging parameter. Fast, successful positioning of new prod- ucts on the market has become vital for a company, and the development of innovative products needs to be accelerated. The production of prototypes is significant for a rapid product development (RPD) process.

One feature of this process is the coordination of work tasks within the distributed teams. It will become increasingly important to bring together the different experts. Effective and efficient project management is the basis for the way a team functions. The early integration of different experts serves as a means to develop innovative products. This is also an important factor concerning costs because the main part of the end costs are determined in the early phases of product development. To facilitate the integration of different experts and enhance the efficiency of the iterative phases, prototypes are used as cost-efficient visual models.

New RP Technologies

Generative prototyping technologies, such as stereolithography (STL), reduce prototyping lead times from a few hours to up to three months, depending on the quality required. These prototypes can serve as visual models or as models for follow-up technologies such as casting.

Planning and Integration of Product Development-0017

New, powerful CAD technologies make it possible to check design varieties in real time employ- ing virtual reality tools. The use of virtual prototypes, especially in the early phases of product development, enables time- and cost-efficient decision making.

Communication Technologies

ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks (Ginsburg 1996) and gigabit ethernet networking (Quinn and Russell 1999) enable a quick and safe exchange of relevant data and thus support the development process tremendously. The Internet provides access to relevant information from all over the world in no time, such as via the World Wide Web or e-mail messages. Communication and cooperation are further supported by CSCW tools (Bullinger et al. 1996) like videoconferencing and e-mail. The distributed teams need technical support for the development of a product to enable synchronous and asynchronous interactions. Furthermore, the Internet provides a platform for the interaction of distributed experts within the framework of virtual enterprises. The technologies used support the consciousness of working temporarily in a network, which includes, for example, the possibility of accessing the same files. All these new technologies have been the focus of scientific and industrial interest for quite a while now. However, the understanding how these new technologies can be integrated into one continuous process chain has been neglected. Combining these technologies effectively enables the product-development process to be reduced decisively. Rapid product devel- opment is a holistic concept that describes a rapid development process achieved mainly by combining and integrating innovative prototyping technologies as well as modern CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) tools.

Objectives of the new concept of RPD are to:

• Shorten the time-to-market (from the first sketch to market launch)

• Develop innovative products by optimizing the factors of time, cost, and quality

• Increase quality from the point of view of the principle of completeness

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