Impacts of concurrency, iteration, design review, and problem complexity on design project lead time and error generation

Journal Article (2012)
Author(s)

H. Nam Le (University of Cambridge)

David Wynn (University of Cambridge)

Peter John Clarkson (University of Cambridge)

Affiliation
External organisation
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.1177/1063293X11435177
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Publication Year
2012
Language
English
Affiliation
External organisation
Issue number
1
Volume number
20
Pages (from-to)
55-67

Abstract

A case study of an aircraft engine manufacturer is used to analyze the effects of management levers on the lead time and design errors generated in an iteration-intensive concurrent engineering process. The levers considered are amount of design-space exploration iteration, degree of process concurrency, and timing of design reviews. Simulation is used to show how the ideal combination of these levers can vary with changes in design problem complexity, which can increase, for instance, when novel technology is incorporated in a design. Results confirm that it is important to consider multiple iteration-influencing factors and their interdependencies to understand concurrent processes, because the factors can interact with confounding effects. The article also demonstrates a new approach to derive a system dynamics model from a process task network. The new approach could be applied to analyze other concurrent engineering scenarios.

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