product development

This article demonstrates results of a qualitative study in the consumer goods industry. The study shows that translating sustainability into measurable and actionable requirements is a crucial prerequisite for developing products that are more sustainable and successful in the marketplace. However, most companies still struggle with this translation due to a lack of codification of sustainability in their development process.

In the context of risk management the demographic change is reflected in demand and environmental risks. On the one hand, the requirements of products’ target groups are changing. On the other hand, the labour bottleneck is increasing due to the shift in population and age structure. When choosing strategies and measures for dealing with the demographic change in supply chains, companies should consider organizational as well as technological and personnel management-related aspects. In this connection, the integral examination of the complete product line as well as the company’s and the supply chain partners’ development of capabilities are essential.

Nanotechnology offers great potentials for improved product properties and innovative functionalities which have to be considered in the product development in an early stage and compared with product requirements. In practice, a gap is to be recognised between nanotechnology and product development. An approach to close the gap and to improve the interoperability is to define a common language based on a functional-based view. The formalisation and mapping of the functions uses semantic nets and ontologies in order to allow a dynamic expanding and machine readability. Thus, applications and nanotechnology will be linked with the objective of generation new product ideas by nanotechnology.

The use of virtual engineering techniques in the field of product development requires a continuity of all digital development processes, workflows, tools and data. While this continuity is state-of-the-art on a level of geometric description it is still not achieved on a functional description level of product features. This paper analyses the state of the development and current problems in the process of introduction of virtual engineering in machine and plant engineering enterprises. Furthermore, the authors present their current research works in development of continuous digital process chains for product development.

The paper describes a model conceived at the IMI for the management of product and process knowledge in complex multi-project environments. Coming from project and product-related approaches of project, program and portfolio management, an integrated model based on a universal product structure was developed which aims at supporting the transfer of product and process knowledge over enterprise hierarchies and thus to shorten the development time during the development process.

The market-oriented product development describes a focusing of needs, which leads ideally to high product quality and profitability. In the context of “Digital Factory” this paper focuses on the integrated product and process design, which is oriented to the physical part of the product. Due to the high product complexity, shorter product life cycles and increased competition situation is the product development faced with new challenges. Both the speed and the quality of planning should be improved further. Only the combination of organizational approaches and information technologies like for example “Simultaneous Engineering” and the “Digital Factory” promises a sufficient increase of planning efficiency. The following paper deals with existing methodologies and promising approaches in the field of “Digital Factory” against the background of an integrated product and process design. Referring to the requirements of logistics planning, an early integration of ...

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.

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 ...

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.

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.