Product Development

Due to increasing product complexity, quality, timing and resource constraints, the management of product development projects becomes more and more challenging. Especially the determination of current product quality, an indicator for the actual development status, is hard to accomplish. For this reason, the article presents a concept for a real-time quality estimation for products and intermediate results. The concept is used and evaluated in the semiconductor industry.

Strategic product planning and strategic technology planning is more important than ever. This planning is based upon the anticipation of market and technology developments. The article shows how new technologies are taken up and how they can be combined to coherent technology strategies. These help the companies to further develop the product range and to position themselves advantageously in the competition of tomorrow. A consistent example from the automotive lighting engineering underlines the high feasibility of the methodology.

Technical innovations and increasing international stress of competition have lead wordwide operating companies as well as small and medium-sized companies to bring very complex products in a huge number of variants into the market. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is an approach to handle this complexity. In this paper a generic process model for a pragmatic evaluation of PLM solutions in a PLM implementation project is presented. Over the past years large companies, especially in aircraft and automotive industries, have made experiences with PLM and especially PLM implementation which can be adapted directly or indirectly by companies of small and medium sizes.

The environment of industrial enterprises is characterised by an increasing degree of complexity, dynamics, and uncertainty. To cope with the rising demands, companies have to produce unique high-quality products in a cost-effective and timely manner. In contrast, the current proceeding for product generation can be characterized by a wide variety of time- and cost-consuming coordination efforts by usage of physical prototypes. Non-continuous process chains are additionally decelerated by island-like software tools. Promising approaches to handle the challenges facing industrial enterprises are subsumed by the term Digital Manufacturing, which comprises the planning, integration and operation of product- and production-related processes in industrial enterprises by means of information technology (IT). In this paper, we highlight three promising areas of Digital Manufacturing, the support in product development by bridging the gap between product and production engineering, the ...

Even during ramp-up phases technical product changes are inevitable. Swift and spontaneous reaction is therefore required for meeting the set market entry date. At the same time, risk estimation of different solution alternatives is needed to evaluate the effects of product changes on product and processes. In this context unstructured procedures observed in practice lead to unsatisfactory solutions and unforeseeable effects. This dilemma of product change management has been countered with the development of PMEA (Product Change Mode and Effect Analysis) and its combination with TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving).

In changing environments organisations are faced not only with economical and technological aspects but also with ecological and social ones (Corporate Social Responsibility). This involves a rethinking, especially in production systems, because both the resource usage and the contact with employees, suppliers and stakeholders must be reconsidered. Sensemaking can help to direct the organisation to a common aim and leads to a better understanding of the needed shift in the mental structures of management and employees.

The successful management of product development projects presents a key success factor that is based on shorter time-to-market times. Development projects are known for their complexity that often leads to failure in keeping deadlines and overspending of project budgets. Innovative methods for prospective project description and complexity determination are necessary in order to meet the demands made of product development projects’ management. Thus, indicators for achieving an optimized development process can already be attained in the project planning phase.

A continuously growing number of product variants and the configuration of globally operating production networks lead to a high number of process variants within these networks. Thus, internal complexity is added to the business. While modularization and standardization are state-of-the-art with regard to the actual product in order to manage complexity a lack of respective actions has to be considered in the field of manufacturing engineering. However, controlling these processes’ complexity and variety is a critical factor of success, too. The presented approach researches influencing factors on standardization of manufacturing engineering processes in a global network. It is based on practical experiences in the commercial vehicle industry. Taking into account different product and process related requirements an optimal degree of standardization can be deduced.

Today, most modern mechanical engineering products are strongly driven by information technology. Therefore, the degree of complexity increases, which can reduced by a consistent modularization of the product. This contribution describes which challenges arise especially for the modularization of mechatronic systems, how the product structuring can be conducted and how the product development process is affected.

Today in mechanical engineering it is hardly possible to elude the demands for a variant-rich product spectrum. The resulting complexity can be reduced and controlled only by effective and efficient variant management. This article presents the product structuring as one of the central tasks of variant management in product development. The structuring determines the characteristics of the product just as the development process and has substantial influence on every process in the enterprise.