Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, February 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-72). / This is a study into the allocation of resources in the early stages of research in a small commercial entity that develops innovative technologies. The premise is that resource allocation must focus on the implementation of the technology from a broad, end-to-end, systems viewpoint rather than purely on the inventive or scientific research. Only by understanding and addressing issues early in a development process can technology be efficiently developed. This thesis examines in depth the approach to the development of technologies taken by eight small innovative research companies in the New England Area. These companies all received funding through the government's Small Business Innovative Research program. Half of the companies received additional funding from external entities and qualified for Fast Track funding from the Department of Defense. The study was conducted by means of a questionnaire and in person interviews to identify how companies identify, evaluate and allocate resources to challenges. The strategies that were followed, problems encountered, collaborations with other entities and the outcomes of their programs were examined. This process set up a natural experiment between companies that received Fast Track and thus external funding on the basis of augmented external communication. The main conclusions of the research are that the Fast Track program, for the small sample studied here, did not influence the processes followed by the companies. Rather the long-term strategies of the companies dictated how they dealt with adversity. Moreover, in contradiction to previous studies that examined these same companies immediately after the SBIR work was completed, the fast-track companies showed no greater commercialization / (cont.) success than the comparison companies. The diminished differentiator of the Fast Track program can be attributed to a) the great deal of uncertainty that is inherent with applications research and b) the short time and limited funding of the SBIR program, which in itself limits the probability of success independent of the Fast-Track mechanism. / by Jacob v.R. Pretorius. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis studies some aspects of the business performance collapse of Xerox Corporation towards the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 21" century. Utilizing the field of system dynamics as the primary modeling and analysis tool, the thesis specifically looks at three interrelated factors that an extensive public literature search, and the author's own personal experience as a Xerox employee, showed were of central importance in Xerox' decline. These factors, and their effects, were the following. First, Xerox reorganized and consolidated its U.S. customer administration centers (CACs) from approximately three-dozen geographically distributed locations to a small handful of centralized locations. This left customers with new and unfamiliar administrative staff who were more prone to making billing errors and were less efficient in fixing them once they were discovered, thereby beginning the process of alienating customers and also forcing the sales staff to spend less time selling as they tried to fix the billing errors. Secondly, Xerox realigned and reorganized its direct sales force from a geographic structure to one based on specific industries. This broke tremendous numbers of customer/sales representative relationships, thereby further alienating customers, since many sales reps either left Xerox (due primarily to the turmoil within Xerox) or, if they stayed, they had their territories changed. This also resulted in sales reps spending less time selling, both in the short term (due to increased new hire training, industry realignment training, and "FUD factor" chum) and in the long term (due to increased travel time). Thirdly, especially relative to its competition, Xerox' product line began to lose appeal in the marketplace. Ultimately, however, my analysis shows that the almost simultaneous confluence of these three factors had a nonlinear effect on Xerox' business - an effect that was worse than the sum of the three individual factors had they each occurred alone. And, since the time constants involved in these dynamics and in the overall system that is the document processing market are in many cases on the order of years, the effects on Xerox' business were significantly longer than the duration of the causal factors themselves. / by Richard L. Howe. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 75). / Adding to the increasing complexity and ambiguity in products and customer values, the sudden rise in the clockspeed of business operations is forcing existing companies towards a new organizational model, which autonomously integrates knowledge across technologies, functions, and clockspeeds to find optimal solutions. This thesis first analyzes clockspeed characteristics in terms of four dimensions (customer value, product, process, and organization) and clarifies them by means of presentations. Based on this analysis, it develops a conceptual framework and an organizational model for the mixed clockspeed organization: that is, a company whose products individually involve components or elements with different clockspeeds, and where the four dimensions of clockspeed are not necessarily highly correlated. Finally, the thesis proposes an original model for organizing such a mixed clockspeed organization, focused on building an intermediate layer of organization to mediate between the formal business unit structures and the informal human networks that have long been recognized as crucially important for technical organizations. / by Eiichi Tanabe. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-212). / In an attempt to improve their Product Development Processes (PDPs), many companies make considerable investments to have available cutting-edge technology such as virtual tools. While some companies have increased their productivity and time to market with them, some others have not. There seem to be fundamental factors above and beyond the use of these tools that can obstruct the PDP and one of them appears to be the misalignment between the product architecture and the organizational interactions of the actors working on it. While there has been significant work addressing the technical and social concerns of a PDP independently, the nature of the misalignment requires an integrated analysis of the product architecture and the organization. The present work studies them in an integrated approach by making use of network analyses. The research for this thesis was conducted in a Global Product Development (GPD) project of an automotive manufacturer. By first using as a reference the Multidisciplinary System Design Optimization (MSDO) to decompose the architecture of a product and then, using a specific type of Design Structure Matrix (DSM) [43] called N2 Diagram to identify the interfaces of the architecture, a network called theoretical sociogram was created. In addition, the relative sensitivity of some objectives describing the functioning of the product's systems was calculated to classify the strength of the ties in two levels: strong for those above an absolute relative sensitivity of 0.5, and weak for those with an absolute relative sensitivity lower or equal than 0.5. / (cont.) Furthermore, through surveys and interviews, the organizational interactions for two different phases of the project were mapped to construct a new set of networks called actual sociograms. By comparing the sociograms and utilizing metrics that deal with the centrality of the actors in the network, the misalignments were identified. The misalignments provided guidance to identify the enablers and obstacles influencing the PDP. It was observed that, in some cases, when the sensitivity among variables was weak, engineering teams tend to use intermediaries to share information. In some other circumstances the direct interaction doesn't occur, due to reasons including cultural aspects, complexity of the information, the way the information is structured and organizational fuzziness, among others. Based on these findings, some recommendations based on literature review, lessons learned from other industries and conversations with Product Development (PD) actors, are provided. / by J. Adrian Diaz Garcia. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 130-132). / by Martin Busse. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-91). / The use of software in commercial aviation has expanded over the last two decades, moving from commercial passenger transport down into single-engine piston aircraft. The most comprehensive and recent official guidance on software certification guidelines was approved in 1992 as DO-178B, before the widespread use of object-oriented design and complex aircraft systems integration in general aviation (GA). The new technologies present problems not foreseen by the original guidance material and may complicate demonstration of compliance with such guidance material. The Federal Aviation Administration has deferred to industry experts in the form of the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics (RTCA) and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) to create software and system approval guidance. The FAA's Advisory Circular (AC) 23.1309- 1C created a four-tier approval system to reduce software and system approval burden on smaller aircraft, creating a lower standard for small aircraft in the hopes that safety gains from technology would outweigh the potential cost of defects from less stringent requirements. Further guidance regarding the role of software in the overall system is spread across other documents including Aerospace Recommended Practice (ARP) 4754, ARP 4761, and applicable SAE Aerospace Standards (AS). The guidance material, spread across several documents, lacks sufficient specificity to be of use to an everyday practitioner. In addition the guidelines are not necessarily rigorously enforced when the same artifacts are required at different levels of design assurance as stated within DO-178B itself. / (cont.) After a literature review and regulatory analysis, this thesis investigates some example defects that escaped detection during application of the guidance in a real-world product, making specific recommendations to improve the guidance in a usable way. / by Ryan Erwin Berk. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 123-125). / This research explores what requirements are necessary for the development of a turbofan engine and how they evolve through the product development cycle. This work utilizes a parameter-based design structure matrix (DSM) to define the interfaces and interdependencies present in a large commercial aircraft propulsion system. The DSM was developed from the system level to the module level allowing one to examine the assumptions made throughout the entire life cycle of the product. The work utilizes the system-level DSM to show the similarities between the turbofan engine product development process (PDP) and the software spiral product development process. This work examines the parameter-based DSM in each of the design phases and attempts to understand the assumptions made in each phase and how the assumptions change as the product proceeds through the development cycle. By examination of the DSM, it was found that program goals and requirements lead to an initial set of design parameters. These design parameters are then iterated until a satisfactory product defamation is developed. Each stage concludes with the integration and testing of that stages work. In all stages risk management occurs and with the necessary revision of the program plan for subsequent stages (not in the system-level DSM). The work shows that the PDP for a turbofan engine can be viewed as a spiral process. The thesis then suggests that, in general, the current industry practices for the development of complex physical systems have similarity to the spiral framework for development of software. / by Douglas C. Hague. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. / The general belief is that Location-Based Services (LBS) in emerging economies does not make much sense until there is widespread availability of geographic information system (GIS) data, broadband internet access, payment methods, infrastructure such as power, well developed advertising platform, etc. There is also the belief that these deficiencies make it next to impossible to realize revenues from the existing revenue models such as mobile adverts, online adverts, subscription, etc. This study shows how LBS services can be developed and deployed in emerging economies within these given set of constraints. It also adduces methods for overcoming some of the identified hindrances such as ways for creating effective and sufficient revenues from online and mobile adverts. The central hypothesis for this work is encapsulated in a "change of mindset" from developing products comparable to those in developed world (United States, Western Europe) to developing products which meet the immediate needs of the local environment in emerging economies/developing economies (however crude these solutions may appear initially from the POV of the developed world) and make use of not only locally available technologies but locally available phenomena. These solutions are then refined as they are consumed by the populace and the populace becomes more "sophisticated". This hypothesis is developed and fleshed out in a methodical manner using data and examples from developing countries - Nigeria (Africa), India (Asia), etc. This study finishes with the architecting of an LBS service (routing/navigation service) for an emerging economy using the framework developed in this study. Recommended future work includes developing more LBS services using this framework and deployment of the developed service, followed by a detailed analysis of the framework and possibly refinements to it. / by Ifeanyi Katchy. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, June 2001. / "May 2001." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-71). / by Hai The Truong. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-104). / Supply chain management is one of the fundamental issues in the manufacturing and operation management. The performance of supply chain management directly affects an organization's overall performance. For the past several years, supply chain management has been a growing concern in modern manufacturing and business processes because of the complexity of products and new technologies. Especially, information technology and widespread usage of web-based systems are changing strategies of how companies manage their operations, supply chain structures and strategic alliances. A supply chain network by nature is a large and complex, engineering and management system. To understand its structure and to design effective policies, the internal dynamic behavior of the supply chain must be studied. System dynamics is an effective tool for understanding the structure and internal dynamic behaviors of a large and complex system. This thesis focuses on a supply chain problem at LSMC. Traditionally, LSMC is an engineering, technological and manufacturing driven company and its products have been dominant in the market for many years. For the past few years, however, the greater competition in the industry and the increasing pressures from the upstream and downstream of LSMC's supply chain have created interesting dynamic behaviors. The purpose of this thesis is to apply system dynamics methodology to LSMC's supply chain problem and potentially apply the framework of this thesis to general supply chain problems in other industries. The thesis includes various simulations and analyses to understand the problem. Especially eigenvalue elasticities approach provides significant insights, which deepen the understanding of the structure of the model and its dynamic behavior, and lead to the conclusion that the oscillatory behavior in the production inventories and in the demand for LSMC's products is an endogenous cause. / by Chalermmon Lertpattarapong. / S.M.