The high level of competition and the rapidly growing technology development has created new challenges for today's businesses where they are forced to deliver more customized products at a lower price and a shorter time period. This places high demands on the companies' ability to design and develop better products in a more efficient way. In addition to developing products, the design process focuses on securing long-term success for the company by developing nourishing skills. However, to achieve an effective design process the companies must improve their ability to plan as well as use their knowledge base in a more efficient manner. Toyota's product development system is a critical component for companies to address challenges that they’re facing and offers a great potential to create significant competitive advantages. Toyota's product development system is designed to streamline the design of processes and products, as they often create restrictions on business and describes the importance of making use of a coordinated effort by several functions, and strives to integrate processes, people, technology and tools in an effective manner.   The concept of Concurrent Engineering includes parallel efforts rather than a time-consuming serial work and seeks to minimize delays in the product development process. Concurrent Engineering enables for quality products, to reach the market faster at a lower cost and allows the company to quickly and flexibly adapt to changing demands and conditions through parallel efforts. Like Toyota’s product development system, Concurrent Engineering promotes an integrated approach where multifunctional teams work towards a common goal striving to solve problems at an early stage.   Propulsion and Control in Västerås, a division within Bombardier Transportation, is currently suffering from extensive engineering changes and struggles to uphold time plans and budgets. The thesis will therefore cover the complete product development process where focus has been directed towards the processes and conditions that could enable for an effective product development process. During the thesis work the underlying causes for the problems mentioned above, have been identified. Internal documents regarding the company's current process has been reviewed and interviews have been carried out in order to evaluate the company’s current situation. During the thesis work a comparative study has been conducted at a large company within the Mälardalen-region. This study has been used as a practical example to reinforce the theoretical reasoning and has additionally allowed for further examination of a company's product development process.   The thesis has resulted in a number of suggestions for improvements, where the main action areas are covered by cross-functionality, routines, follow-up, supplier involvement and prototypes. Another action area that has been identified is front-loading which aims at examining several alternatives and solving problems as well as creating countermeasures at an early stage. These six areas were found to have a significant role in creating an effective product development process and are considered to be relevant for the company's current situation.

This thesis suggests a new framework for cooperative modeling which supports concurrency design protocol with a design history tracking function. The proposed framework allows designers to work together while eliminating design conflicts and redundancies, and preventing infeasible designs. This framework provides methods to track optimal design path and redundant design history in the overall design process. This cooperative modeling architecture consists of a modeling server and voxel-based multi-client design tool. Design change among server and multiple clients are executed using the proposed concurrency design protocol. The design steps are tracked and analyzed using Design Tracking Graph and Design Tracking Matrix (DTM), which provide a design data exchange algorithm allowing seamless integration of design modifications between participating designers. This framework can be used for effective cooperative modeling, and helps identify and eliminate conflicts and minimize delay. The proposed algorithm supports effective cooperative design functions. First, it provides a method to obtain the optimal design path which can be stored in a design library and utilized in the future design. Second, it helps capture modeling pattern which can be used for analyzing designer's performance. Finally, obtained redundancies can be used to evaluate designer?s design efficiency.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, March, 2001. / Title from PDF t.p.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-94).

M.Phil. / Product development is very important to the survival of an engineering organisation. It therefore needs to be carefully managed and completed within planned time and allocated resources. The main focus in this dissertation is therefore investigating how time could be reduced in the product development process. • Customers are not always patient enough to wait for the "best" products that are still being developed; they want products immediately and would therefore choose the "next best" products available. Some customers are willing to pay high prices to get exactly what they need as soon as possible. This study looks at how to accelerate the product development process without sacrificing quality and product performance. The study also investigates the case of development of a Boeing 777 commercial aircraft and contrasts the Boeing product development process against the product development theory. Boeing 777 is a globally well known commercial aircraft that was designed in the record time. Investigating the Boeing 777 product development process will provide good indicators of approaches that are currently most applicable in the real world.

The construction industry in the United Kingdom is a multi-billion pound business that contributes, on average 10% of the UK Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, it is seen by many to be underachieving in terms of service delivery and investment opportunities. Projects are frequently late and over budget much to the disappointment of those involved in the industry and especially clients. Many investigations have been commissioned and resulting reports have suggested improvements in the way the industry is organised. Procurement of construction projects in the main are undertaken using methods that support fragmentation and adversarial relationships. However, with the introduction of partnering and prime contracting some improvements have been made. Procurement of a construction project begins with the strategies developed during briefing and is only complete when the facility is handed over to the client, some contract strategies allow for the facility to be completed once it is in operation, has been maintained and eventually is demolished. Costings and programmes are then related to life-cycle issues and aspects such as maintenance have to be taken into account during the facility development stages. The adoption of Concurrent Engineering (CE) is seen to offer the construction industry a way forward. Having been adopted extensively by manufacturing in its product development stages a similar adoption by the construction industry would go some way to achieving the 30% improvement in real terms suggested by Latham [1994] and Egan [1998]. The research described in the thesis aims to develop a new procurement method for the delivery of construction projects. The approach adopted was to identify current methods of procurement and the problems associated with each method. Then using Concurrent Engineering as a basis, a new procurement model was developed that offered potential improvements in the construction process between the stages of Clients Briefing and Detailed Design. The resulting model was evaluated through the application of CE principles into the process and by the presentation and discussion of the method with a number of industry participants, followed by the completion and assessment of a questionnaire. The model was shown to fulfil the principles of CE and could be adopted into construction. It offers a new approach to procurement which in turn would save costs and time and potentially improve the quality of the final construction product.

The purpose of this bachelor thesis was to examine risks in Saab Training & Simulations project model and the way they execute projects to present an improvement proposal. The study was executed through quantitative and qualitative data gathering in form of interviews and collecting of project reports. The result showed differences between the project model and the execution. The risks were mainly connected to the execution and could be summarized in to three problem areas, manager dependent project management that creates confusion and uncertainty in the line organization and project groups, communication faults during the execution resulting in unnecessary purchases and that the projects show a tendency of needing more resources at the end of the project due to postponed milestones. Based on the findings an extensive literature review treating general project management, project model and methods as concurrent engineering and agile methods were made. After further analysis, an improvement proposal could be formed, however since Saabs project model were found adequate with several parallel and time effective element the improvements are focused towards the way of working in four hands-on suggestions. • Clear assignation of responsibility - A clearer assignation of responsibility reduces the risks associated with ambiguity and misunderstandings, as a result of person dependent project management.  • Project pulse - Adoption of pulse meetings in the project groups. • Increase customer contact - By increasing the contact and integration with the customer could it be assured that their demands are meet even though it is not known during the sale. • Design for manufacturing and assembly - Clearer guidelines and a way of working and cooperating internally during the product realization could decrease the risk of unnecessary purchases. / Syftet med examensarbetet var att undersöka Saab Training and Simulations projektmodell och arbetssätt för att sedan formulera ett förbättringsförslag. Studien genomfördes genom en kvantitativ och en kvalitativ datainsamling i form av intervjuer och insamling av projektrapporter. Resultatet av datainsamlingen visade att det fanns skillnader mellan den projektmodellen och det arbetssättet som tillämpades på företaget. Riskerna som fanns i utförandet var relaterade främst till arbetssättet och inte projektmodellen. Riskerna kan sammanfattas i tre problemområden. De problemområdena är individberoende projektledning som orsakar missförstånd och osäkerhet i linjeorganisationen och projektgrupperna, kommunikationsbrister under projektgenomförandet som kan resultera i onödiga inköp samt att projekten tenderar att behöva sätta in extra resurser i slutet av projekten som en följd av uppskjutning av milstenar. Vidare genomfördes en litteratursökning som behandlade generell projektledning och olika relevanta projektledningsmodeller eller metoder såsom agila metoder och concurrent engineering, baserat på de risker som upptäcktes under datainsamlingen. Utifrån detta formulerades ett förbättringsförslag. Eftersom projektmodellen innefattar flera parallella inslag anses den vara duglig och det kommer därför inte att presenteras ett förbättringsförslag för modellen. Däremot presenteras ett förbättringsförslag som berör arbetssättet som består av fyra åtgärder.  • Tydligare fördelning av ansvar i projekten  - En tydligare ansvarsfördelning i projekten minskar riskerna för otydligheter och missförstånd vid individberoende projektledning. • Projektpuls  - Projektpuls är ett tillvägagångssätt att öka kommunikationen i projektgruppen under projektgenomförandet  • Ökad kundkontakt - Genom en ökad kundkontakt under projektgenomförandet kan kundens önskningar tillgodoses lättare även i de fall där försäljningsunderlaget från marknad är bristfälligt. • Design for manufacturing and assembly  - Tydligare riktlinjer och ett arbetssätt för det interna samarbetet under produktframtagningen minskar riskerna för exempelvis onödigt inköp.

Ett av de företag som ligger i framkant vad gäller hållbar utveckling är WSP, vilket är ett av världens ledande analys- och teknikkonsultföretag. De har ett globalt innovations- och hållbarhetsprogram som ger stöd i ett arbete med att framtidssäkra sina uppdrag: Future Ready. Problemet är att det i dagsläget inte är helt självklart för en teknisk konsult att erbjuda ett kunderbjudande som även innehåller mjuka värden. Branschens företag ställs inför utmaningen att förflyttas från en traditionell domänexpertis till att vara den som även aktivt minskar den osäkerhet som finns hos kunder, partners och medarbetare vad gäller hållbarhetsfrågor. Därför är syftet med detta arbete att bidra till en ökad förståelse för drivkrafterna och hindren för att lyckas med denna typ av förändring och implementering. Detta arbete vilar på en konceptuell modell, bestående av olika teoriområden, vilken är en potentiell utvecklingsprocess för en teknisk konsult att gå från traditionell domänexpertis till ledande inom innovation. De tre övergripande teoriområdena är Concurrent Engineering (CE), Designdriven innovation (DI) och kulturförflyttning. CE är en metod som bygger på ett samverkande arbetssätt för att utvidga den kontextuella förmågan med avseende på värdeerbjudanden, DI bygger på ökandet av värdet av domänexpertisen vilket ökar den innovativa förmågan och kulturförflyttningen antas ske parallellt med dessa eftersom man i och med den här förflyttningen ändrar fokus från endast hårda värden till att även inkludera mjuka. För att genomföra detta arbete har en kvalitativ metod och Mode 2 i huvudsak tillämpats. Dessutom har en litteraturstudie genomförts och insamling av empiriskt material har skett genom en processkartläggning samt intervjustudie. Analysen för litteraturstudien genomfördes iterativt och intervjustudien utgick från en analysmodell som författaren själv tagit fram, baserat på ett antal nyckelord och teman. Den största drivkraften för att implementera ett arbete med Lead in innovation är tid. Tid är den gemensamma nämnaren vad gäller problematik i dagsläget som identifierades kopplat till de tre teoriområdena. Det största hindret för implementering av CE är det specifika arbetssättet som ”låser fast” medarbetarna till specifika projektdagar. För DI handlar det om det innovativa tankesättet som är svårt att påverka. Angående kulturförflyttningen handlar det om komplexiteten som finns i och med att den tillhör det dolda och därmed är svår att ta till sig. Även om det här arbetet kräver fortsatta studier för att vara genomförbart så belyser det många nya intressanta synvinklar och förslag på en möjlig utvecklingsprocess. Därmed bör detta arbete betraktas som ett bidrag till ett incitament att påbörja en resa för såväl WSP som andra företag eller organisationer att gå från traditionell domänexpertis till Lead in innovation. / One of the companies at the forefront of sustainable development is WSP, which is one of the world's leading analysis and engineering consulting companies. They have a global innovation and sustainability program with the aim to see and analyze the future more clearly: Future Ready. The problem is that it is not always obvious for a technical consultant how to offer and increase the soft values towards the customer. The industry's companies are faced with the challenge of moving from a traditional domain expertise to be the one who also actively reduces the uncertainty that exists among customers, partners and employees in terms of sustainability issues. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to contribute to an increased understanding of the driving forces and obstacles to succeed with this type of change and implementation. This work rests on a conceptual model, of different theory areas, which is a potential development process for a technical consultant to move from traditional domain expertise to leading innovation. The theory is based upon Concurrent Engineering (CE), Design-driven Innovation (DI) and cultural movement. CE is a method that is based on a collaborative approach to expand the contextual ability regarding value offering, DI is based on how to increase the domain expertise value, which increases the innovative ability and the cultural movement is assumed to be parallel to these because this movement changes focus from only hard to even soft values. To carry out this work, a qualitative method and Mode 2 have mainly been applied. In addition, a literature study has been conducted and the collection of empirical material has been done through a process mapping and interview study. The analysis for the literature study was carried out iteratively and the interview study was based on an analysis model which the author herself produced, based on several keywords and themes. The biggest driving force for implementing work with Lead in innovation is time. Time is the common denominator regarding the current problem areas and seen as an interlinkage between the three areas within this project. The biggest obstacle to implementing CE is the specific way of working that "locks in" the employees to specific project days. DI requires every employee to think innovative, which can be hard to achieve. Due to the fact that the culture is hidden, it is hard to grasp which indeed makes it hard to overcome. Although this work requires continued studies to be feasible, it highlights many new interesting perspectives and proposals for a possible development process. Thus, this work should be regarded as a contribution to an incentive to start a journey for both WSP and other companies or organizations to move from traditional domain expertise to Lead in innovation.