Project-Driven Concurrent Product and Processes Development

When entering the global market, companies encounter several difficulties, the most severe being long product development times and too high costs of sequential product and process development. In order to overcome this problem, the companies will have to make a shift from sequential product and processes development (which is wasteful regarding time and costs) to a project-driven concurrent product and processes development as soon as possible. "Customer is the king!” is becoming the motto of the global market. In the competition between suppliers of products only those companies will survive, which can offer innovative and individual products of good quality, produced in shortest possible time and at the lowest price (Eversheim et al., 1995). Strong competition, existence of the market of customers and increased complexity of products and processes are the characteristics of today's competition. Fast product and process development, combined with timely participation of customers and suppliers, together with entering the market at the right time, seem to be the decisive criteria for the market success of a product. The first supplier of a new product on the market has an advantage over the competition and thus he has the possibility of a faster return of product development investments (Duhovnik et al., 2001). The company has to switch from sequential to concurrent product and process development (i.e. from sequential to concurrent engineering) in order to reduce product and process development time, reduce development costs and ensure quality of the product according to the customer's wishes (Prasad, 1996). The paper presents a procedure for project-driven concurrent product and processes development by taking into account three strategic management methods: parallelness, standardisation and integration of product development processes. Also presented are the changes in organisational concept of the company, organisation of processes, organisation of work and organisation of IT, which are required for a transition from sequential to concurrent product and processes development. Finally, an analysis is presented on concurrent product and processes development teams in a company; this analysis is a prerequisite for a transition to a new method of product and processes development.