Concept for the industrialization of physical products in the highly iterative product development

Abstract

With the ongoing technological progress, companies are facing a con- tinuously changing market environment. This results in the shortening of product life cycles, increasing individualization of products as well as smaller batch sizes. Thus, changing customer requirements during the product development pose challenges for production management. However, plan-driven development ap- proaches, in contrast to highly iterative development methods do not provide a possibility to cope with these challenges. Hence, products must be launched quickly and at competitive prices. To turn inventions into innovations that achieve actual market success, a holistic indus- trialization concept is required. Therefore, the conflict of highly iterative product development and plan-driven process development is analyzed and transferred into product- and process-specific design guidelines. Finally, a six-step approach for the industrialization of highly iteratively developed products is presented.