Conformity measures and their aggregation for multi-actor new product development projects
by Marc Zolghadri, Laurent Geneste, Philippe Girard
International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management (IJPLM), Vol. 2, No. 4, 2007

Abstract: Performing New Product Development (NPD) projects requires collaboration of lots of engineers, designers and managers. Companies run frequently such projects but not all of them are able to transform ideas into business success. One of these success factors is closely related to the efficiency of project coordination and management. This article deals with specific performance measures, namely, conformity measures, which can be used as a powerful parameter for NPD projects management. We consider an NPD project as a network of services provided by actors to each other. According to this idea, a given conformity measure, defined for every couple of actors, qualifies the quality of the service provided by an actor to another. Conformity measures appraise then the satisfaction degree of an actor who contributes to NPD project workflows regarding his/her collaborators. These service-links among actors allow to define four main parameters: forward, backward, upward and downward conformity measures. Once defined, two of them are illustrated through case studies. The first one concerns bicycle design process. The second one refers to a very simplified linear manufacturing procedure of a French car manufacturer, PEUGEOT™. For both the cases, we propose a visual aggregation method, which qualifies the global quality of the considered process.

Online publication date: Wed, 14-May-2008

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