Concurrent Product Development Across the Supply Chain: Development of Integrator/Supplier Risk and Coupling Indices

Abstract

Abstract This paper develops the fundamental requirements, definitions and metrics that will serve as a foundation for a method to aid in concurrent product development (CPD) across the supply chain. A case study at HP validated nine sources of CPD uncertainty and identified four new important ideas that led to five key requirements for CPD across the supply chain. The concepts of degree of design customization and degree of coupling are introduced as a framework by which to evaluate the risk introduced into the product development process by suppliers. The engineering metric supplier coupling, the engineering metric deviation from target and the degree of design customization indices are defined and integrated into a process to facilitate risk assessment from the integrator’s perspective both at the system-level and supplier-level. The paper concludes by presenting the future research agenda.