Product Development Task Planning Using Worth Flow Analysis

The acceleration of the product development cycle continues to be a significant challenge for manufacturing enterprises around the world. This paper describes a task planning method that minimizes the number of trial and error to reduce the development time for large-scale and complex products at the early stage of product development. The proposed method matches groups of product components and determines the development sequence for each component to minimize the amount of feedback information required across task groups. The method provides, as evaluation indices for task prioritization, the product-sum of engineering interaction among components and worth of each component, which the authors define as the “worth flow.” A generic hair dryer with simple mechanical structure serves as an example, illustrating that the proposed method contributes to the reduction in the amount of information required for setting the interface links by 65% compared with the conventional planning methods.