Reducing Design Cycle Time and Cost Through Process Resequencing, presented at.pdfVIP

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING DESIGN ICED 97 TAMPERE, AUGUST 19 - 21, 1997 REDUCING DESIGN CYCLE TIME AND COST THROUGH PROCESS RESEQUENCING James L. Rogers Keywords: design cycle, genetic algorithm, decomposition, concurrent engineering 1 Introduction In today’s competitive environment, companies are under enormous pressure to reduce the time and cost of their design cycle. One method for reducing both time and cost is to develop an understanding of the flow of the design processes and the effects of the iterative subcycles that are found in complex design projects. Once these aspects are understood, the design manager can make decisions that take advantage of decomposition, concurrent engineering, and parallel processing techniques to reduce the total time and the total cost of the design cycle. One software tool that can aid in this decision-making process is the Design Manager’s Aid for Intelligent Decomposition (DeMAID). The DeMAID software minimizes the feedback couplings that create iterative subcycles, groups processes into iterative subcycles, and decomposes the subcycles into a hierarchical structure. The real benefits of producing the best design in the least time and at a minimum cost are obtained from sequencing the processes in the subcycles. 2 Design structure matrix Any nontrivial design project consists of numerous processes that are dependent on one another. This interdependency can become quite complicated. To reduce this complexity, numerous approaches, such as PERT, were developed to aid in understanding and managing these processes. Unfortunately, these types of tools are only applicable to sequential and parallel activities and cannot handle the iterative subcycles. A new