Flexibility, resource efficiency, and time-to-market are key success factors for industrial enterprises. Essential settings are set during early phases of product development as well as manufacturing. In later product lifecycle phases, the responses from the market (e.g. complains or the amount of damage cases) show the maturity stage of the products. Quality methods like TQM or EFQM pursue the...

Marketing establishes a communication network between producers and consumers. Nowadays, marketing approach is customer-focused and products are directly oriented to meet customer needs. Marketing, which is a long process, needs organization and management. Therefore strategic marketing planning becomes more and more important in today’s competitive conditions. Main focus of this paper is to ev...

Mass customization depends on a company’s ability to provide customized products or services based on economical and flexible development and production systems. Product family design provides a way to achieve cost-effective mass customization by allowing highly differentiated products to be developed from a common platform while targeting products to distinct market segments. In dynamic and un...

Original scientific paper The process of innovation takes significant resources, and therefore it is of great importance for companies to recognize the ideas with high innovation capacity as early as possible, and in a transparent manner, with the least necessary amount of expert knowledge. Current research indicates that companies often carry out the selection of ideas ad hoc or intuitively, a...

This paper explores the process by which Global Virtual Teams (GVTs), namely groups of geographically dispersed and culturally diverse members, carry out most of their activities using information technology. Three case studies have been conducted and will be described here. These studies investigate specifically the creative process stages of GVTs and other factors susceptible to affect team m...

R&D project selection is a critical interface between the product development strategy of an organization and the process of managing projects day-to-day. This article describes the project selection problem faced by the transmission pre-development group of BMW. The group had to choose a portfolio of projects to set the foundation for the “best powertrain 2000.” This problem of project selecti...

A new, systematic approach to the design-evaluation-test product development cycle is described wherein the vehicle design and simulation environments are integrated. This methodology is applied to brake mechanical design and material selection. Time-domain computations within a vehicle dynamic simulation environment account for brake and lining geometry and material properties, actuator proper...

Current practices in industry are moving towards the market-driven development of software intensive products compared to customer-specific system development. Consequently, product management is faced with several challenges that have to be addressed as a part of the market-driven requirements engineering (MDRE) process. One of the important challenges is how to select the right mix of require...

During product development, ideas are narrowed down to a single one by the designers in order to satisfy the customers’ needs. This process is called concept selection and is crucial to the development of new products because, from this point onward, the design team is committed to a concept whose modification implies delays and additional costs. Decisions made during the concept selection phas...

Collaborative Product Development (CPD) process is characterized by autonomous task control, dynamic task sequence, and frequent team collaboration, which endow the process with high flexibility and uncertainty. In the CPD process, designers are the one of the important elements with prominent characteristics of autonomy, collaboration and initiative, the process is knowledge-based simultaneous...