Workflow structuring and reengineering method for design process

A short lead time for product commercialization is a critical advantage in the era of highly challenging competitions. It is more difficult, however, to shorten the design process rather than manufacturing process since the underlying design activities in process and related data are often interlinked and quite uncertain, and the attempts to perform the design activities concurrently increase the complexity of the design process. In case the targeting process is well-structured and easy to be managed, many approaches have been proposed and it is the best way to use the well-known reengineering method such as crashing the bottle-neck activity. However, they have only concerned mainly about well-defined procedures, not an operational-level sophisticated workflow. As a means to effectively manage and accelerate the design process, a process or workflow model needs to define complex relations such as iteration or coupled dependency in design process in order to coordinate the sophisticated process effectively. And, the acceleration approaches based on the operational-level information needs to be discussed. Firstly, in order to develop an appropriate model that effectively captures the operational-level characteristics in design process, we define the workflow including the control and data flow with an incidence matrix called Workflow Matrix (WfM). Secondly, a workflow structuring method is developed for identifying the reengineering issue and it also transform the complex design process into a well-structured workflow. Finally, we analyze the design process with WfM and suggest reengineering strategies to improve the design process. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.