It is widely believed that with the transition from the industrial to information-based economics, organizational knowledge has emerged as the single most critical resource at both macro and micro levels, which promotes the creation, sharing, and leveraging of the organization???s knowledge in current Customer Order Driven Engineering (CODE) environment. Insufficient knowledge management, hence lack of a structured Enterprise Knowledge Base (EKB) in a CODE environment, whilst involved in New Product Development (NPD) process may result in several problems resulting in creating less successful products. This research establishes an ???Enterprise Knowledge Base (EKB) framework??? with focus on the Product, Process and Organizational issues related to the NPD process. The framework has three major stages, namely ???Knowledge Acquisition???, ???Knowledge Organizing??? and ???Knowledge Validating???. Various frameworks/methods/models are developed as steps for each of these stages. The framework may increase the effectiveness of product and process development as well as enterprise competitiveness through developing a system architecture to understand, analyse and map organisational, operational activities and business objectives; and increasing the ability of an organisation to establish an integrated partnerships to share efforts on the design, manufacture and delivery of products. In knowledge acquisition stage, a ???Knowledge Capture framework??? and the ???Relationship matrices??? are developed to analyse and link the generic knowledge items of a NPD process in concurrent engineering environment. Among the relationship matrices, Task versus Task (Design Structure Matrix - DSM) matrix is comprehensively explored and decomposed to structure and link several processes at different levels for effective representation of the overall enterprise representation. In knowledge organizing stage, the acquired knowledge (important relations identified in the Task versus Task matrices) is represented in the form of ???Questionnaires???. Best practices gathered from several manufacturing firms in NPD in CODE have also been used as knowledge resource base for the Questionnaires. For grouping and validation of these Questionnaires, an ???Assessment Model??? is developed, which consists of five performance indicators of the organization namely ???Marketing???, ???Technical???, ???Financial???, ???Resource Management???, and ???Project Management???. Industry applications are carried out in two Australian Manufacturing Companies for the validation of the acquired knowledge. Two tests are carried out; in order to assess the sensitivity of question categories followed by another test to observe whether the model can accurately display the overall performance of the company in the five categories of NPD phases. These two tests have identified possible improvement areas in the NPD process of manufacturing organizations involved in the validation phase. Up to 80% of the findings of the EKB framework and assessment model were found to reflect the actual practices of the organizations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/230412 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Sharif, Syed Ahsan, Mechanical & Manufacturing Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Syed Ahsan Sharif, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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