Architectural Approaches to Strategic Product Development

Abstract

While traditional design research has concentrated on creativity from a clean sheet, however in practice many design projects have been conducted by the modification or incremental development of existing systems to meet new requirements and regulations. Indeed, Ab initio designing is rare, while many new product developments proceed by modifying existing products. Radical design, which begins from white paper, requires new knowledge that carries higher uncertainty and an increased risk of market failure, compared with existing knowledge. Although many enterprises expect more success from radical innovations, most new products only improve or modify existing products. Therefore, minimizing novelty to reduce risk and cost, by using tried and tested solutions and carried-over components, is a key objective. In many industries, more formal procedures for specifying tight and complex requirements are changing the nature of decision making in design processes. The present thesis defines incremental design as a process of modifying or redesigning an existing system while carrying over core competencies in order to meet the required incremental changes and propose the methodologies to established effective strategies for the incremental design. In order to success in incremental product development, it is primary to comprehensively understand the existing products architecture. On the foundation of the understanding, determination of the design targets and effective realization on physical domain should be systemically conducted. The product architecture is defined as the scheme by which the function of a product is allocated to physical components. Therefore, in the incremental design, the existing products architecture could be a design constraint for a new product. For determining design targets on the early stage of product development process, the proposed methodology figures out the interrelationships among functional elements, which specify the products tasks, and based on this, determines the consistent set of specifications that make a product satisfy new requirements. The determined specifications are implemented or realized with physical components on the physical domain. When the existing system incorporates new components in incremental design, reduced changes should be necessarily accompanied. Therefore, efficient rearrangement of the existing components with incorporating new components should be a key design strategy in incremental design. In order to determine a consistent set of design targets in incremental design, the proposed methodology defines the product architecture with specifications on the functional design domain and identifies the specifications that makes customers utility maximize

the design targets are specified with specifications. The methodology was practically developed based on new vehicle planning project, because it traditionally has been conducted in incremental manner, which relies solely on qualitative benchmarking analysis and intuitive human decisions. It has tried to capture the interplay between the important factors in preliminary vehicle design such as functional product architecture (design feasibility constraints), market demands, and economic conditions. The main contribution of the proposed research could read as showing how design information embedded in real data can be utilized in vehicle planning and determine a consistent set of design targets by coordinating those design information on moderate level. The determined design targets are implemented with physical components. When a new product is developed as based on an existing system but with new components, changing not only the components but also the entire architecture on physical domain is unavoidable. Therefore, this thesis proposes a methodology to re-architect an existing system that has modular architecture when new technologies are to be infused via a set of new components. The proposed method explicitly recognizes the existing system, as the foundation of the new system, focuses on the transformation of the existing architecture into the optimal architecture of the new system. Vast amount of prior research on designing modular systems or building product platforms have proposed numerous methodologies to determine the optimal architecture for developing new products, implicitly acknowledging the existence of the previous design. Although it is imperative to determine the goal of the new architecture, the paths of transformation, from the existing to the optimal architecture for a new system, can be exceedingly varied

furthermore, the optimal architecture itself should depend on the transformation path selected to meet the new requirements. Therefore, the method proposed in this paper models the transformation of an existing architecture by reflecting required changes. The present study determined the optimal architecture by consideration of the relevant transformation characteristics.