Managing Iterations in Product Development Process Using Dependency Structure Matrix

Abstract

The market is highly challenging with customers demanding a variety of products at competitive prices. To make a product competitive, it needs to be introduced quickly without compromising on its performance or quality. Thus, reduction of product development cycle time has become essential for companies to thrive and sustain in the market. Product Development (PD) is the set of activities beginning with the perception of a market opportunity and ending in the production, sale and delivery of a product. Companies are forced to develop a well-coordinated development plan to organize their processes and resources to develop competitive products. Today PD confronts complex development challenges. The difficulties in developing complex engineering products do not only arise from their technical complexity but also from the managerial complexity necessary to coordinate the interactions between the different engineering disciplines, which impose additional challenges on the development process. Traditional Project Management techniques are limited in application. Researchers and design managers are constantly searching for the effective and efficient methods for managing PD process. To address the limitations of traditional project management tools, Design Structure Matrix (DSM) has been identified as a sensible tool to represent PD process. In this work, the capability of DSM is demonstrated with a real life case example .The necessity of reducing iterations in PD process using PSM 32 software is also demonstrated.