Design chain management: bridging the gap between engineering and management

Because of economic globalization, modern product development has become greatly dependent on effectively leveraging external resources with customers, suppliers, technology providers, and business partners by means of inter-organizational collaborations. Consequently, supply chain management has received considerable attention, with studied that have concentrated on sales forecasting, production planning, scheduling, and logistics. Few studies have explored global distributed product design, especially from either the engineering or management perspectives. A design chain is a series of activates bound together to add and transform information required to realize a final design. Eppinger andUlrich (2004) proposed fivemain activities to describe design chains: planning, concept development, system-level design, detailed design, and testing and refinement. They further identified the elements of these activities in the functional areas of marketing, designing, and manufacturing. Distributed decision making plays an important role in design chain management for modern product development.