Production start-up phase - A comparison between New Product Development and Production Relocation

Paper in proceeding, 2012

New product development in a globalized industrial environment with a constant increasing competition, challenges the ways to perform production start-up and production relocation. A product development process focuses in general on product function and to avoid product quality problems. A production relocation focus also on avoiding product quality problems, but relocation is mostly related to forgotten or misunderstood information. The challenging situation due to a more global market is the increasing need for production relocation. In this paper, a literature review is performed investigating these three areas and relate them with industrial experience from production relocations. To summaries, the existing processes in industry today seem to be based on processes for product development. The results view that effectiveness in production relocation are dependent on technology and knowledge transfer and the production start-up process.