development process

Today the appropriate handling of complexity is a vital competitive factor for manufacturing firms. An effective complexity management must not only focus on the optimisation of the product architecture but has also to consider the interdependences between the product architecture, the development organisation and the development process. The coherent design of these three domains in the context of complexity management is the topic of this article.

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.

Currently next to the minimization of the production costs the R&D-costs are coming to the fore. This is not just because the share of the R&D-costs in the product costs increases constantly, but also because in a lot of cases the R&D-resources run short and thus become the bottleneck of innovation. The lean innovation approach is concerning all the company’s product-related innovation activities targeting at the maximization of the net benefit of R&D. This article demonstrates the 5-step-realization of lean innovation in companies.

Although accounting for approximately 50 percent of the development costs, measures to ensure product attributes (PA) again and again fail in their implementation. This happens because there is no betimes overview of the final product. Another reason is an insufficient coordination of validation measures. This article presents an approach for an effective and efficient validation process to ensure product attributes. The approach is based on experiences from various projects.