Managing New Product Development as a Complex System of Decisions

Investigators: Dr I. McCarthy, A. Thomson, V. Raja, Warwick University
Prof. Peter Allen and Dr. Jane Gillies, Cranfield University
   
Collaborators: George Jowitt & Sons
Mandall Engineering
GKN Westland Aerospace
PA Consulting

EPSRC Funding: £251,780

Abstract:

Companies lose business because they are not able to respond fast enough to new product enquiries. Despite using project management and concurrent engineering techniques which focus on integrating and reducing the lead-time for each functional activity, companies regularly go 20 – 30% over the tender deadline or delivery date.  Investigation of this problem revealed that 30 – 60% of the overall lead-time is made up of decisional activities, e.g. identifying problems, developing, evaluating and selecting alternatives.

With this the problem, the organisations are asking, “how can we help our people make decisions which reduce the new product development lead-time, whilst maximising the overall output in terms of value?”  The answer to this question must not be at the expense of creativity, innovation and adaptability.

This project is firmly grounded in a real problem which is to help a group of people (a system of decision-makers) competitively bridge the gap between a market idea and business reality. By helping businesses understand and manage their business processes as a complex adaptive system of decisions, the project will seek to:

To achieve this the project will help companies to understand:

 

Contact name: Dr I. McCarthy
Tel: 024 76 573 136
Email: i.p.mccarthy@warwick.ac.uk

Prof. Peter Allen
Tel:  01234 754064
Email:  p.m.allen@cranfield.ac.uk


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