Industrial Experiences of Set-based Concurrent Engineering- Effects, results and applications

Licentiate thesis, 2012

During product development, most of the customer value, as well as the cost and the quality of a product are defined. This key role of development in industry has led to an intense search for better ways to develop products, software, services and systems. One development methodology that has received positive attention is Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE). Some authors claim that SBCE and related practices from Lean Development are four times more productive than traditional development models. Unfortunately, SBCE is also described as hard to implement. This thesis presents the results of a three year research project aimed at implementing and describing the effects of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering in industry. The scope of the research is to use the principles of SBCE as a means to improve the productivity of industrial product development processes and its resulting products. The contribution of this work is a better understanding of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering and a support to implement its principles. The results show that SBCE gives positive effects on many aspects of product development performance and on the resulting products. The improvements are especially dominant on product performance, product cost and the level of innovation Moreover, a comparison between a Set-based decision process and a traditional matrix for design evaluation is presented, showing that these two approaches generate different results. The matrix evaluation promoted the development of new technology and the Set-based process promoted a thorough understanding of the important design parameters of the current designs. Finally, this work presents a structured design process and computer tool for implementing the principles of SBCE. The process was demonstrated by using information from an industrial development project, showing how the proposed process could implement the three principles of SBCE in a traditional Point-based development environment.