Collaborative product development is becoming more valuable because of the increasing coordination and management complexity of organizational information, responsibilities, schedules, deliverables, product information, and business process. As outsourcing and globalization increase the number of design chain participants, a collaborative product development speeds up the decision-making of trusted partners, employees, suppliers, and customers in design chains. Due to continuous changes in design projects, delays in product developments are common. Thus, a change control workflow is needed among design chain participants for product development. A distributed change control workflow for design network is therefore proposed in this study. This type of workflow is a two-layer approach derived from the principles of configuration management and routing algorithm. It has been validated that the consistencies of designs from each participants in design chain is maintained by applying the proposed distributed change control workflow.
The trend of component manufacturing has been changed from electronic manufacturing services (EMS) provider to joint development manufacturer (JDM). EMS is an industry based on providing contract design, manufacturing and product support services on behalf of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). However, all intellectual property of the new product belongs to the OEM. JDM is a company that helps design parts of a product for OEM customers. Unlike EMS, JDM may own the copyright of its design and provide joint design services to its OEM customer. The core competitions of JDM are joint design and productivity of manufacturing. Once basis requirement is hand-off from customer, JDM takes the job of completing the design, performs design verification, assembles and tests prototypes, assembles and tests qualification units, assembles and test proof manufacturing units, and finally produces the production units [6]. Lots of stakeholders have recognized that the earlier the manufacturer becomes involved in the design process, the better the product. When a product is outsourced to OEM, the OEM then outsources it to the lower tiers of JDMs, resulting in a design chain. In order to design a product, JDM has to joint design with its OEM customer and also collaborate with other JDMs in a design chain environment.
Design chain is a subset of supply chain. The major collaborative activities between suppliers and manufacturers are design activities. Therefore, how to manage the design flow in a design chain is as important as how to mange the material flow in a supply chain. Andi and Minato [1] pointed that around 50% of defective designs are caused by changes. It includes requirement changes, specification changes, design document changes, etc. They further showed that 44% of the 79 Japanese construction contractors experienced significant number of design document problems, while 10% had fewer and no experiences. According to the bullwhip effect theory, a slight change would cause huge changes along the supply chain. Therefore, how to control the changes of design documents for maintaining the consistence among design documents is a significant issue. Hameri and Bachy [4] also described that lack of discipline in design change control is one of the fundamental problems of not achieving the project goals.
In this paper, we propose a distributed change control workflow for maintaining the consistence of design documents among JDMs in a design chain. It is basically a workflow derived from the closed-loop change control process of configuration management II (CMII), a variant of configuration management (CM), and a distributed routing algorithm.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we review configuration management and routing algorithm literatures. The proposed distributed change control workflow is presented in Section 3. Section 4 presents the simulation result to validate the change control workflow. In the final section, we make a summary of our study, discuss the limitations, and suggest future researches.
Rapid product design is one of the key approaches for maintaining the competitiveness of an enterprise. In order to focus on the core competencies, outsourcing the nonvalue-adding activities is the trend of today's supply chain. Therefore, a distributed changed control workflow is developed in this paper. The potential combination of the closed-loop change control process proposed in CMII (a social science perspective) and distributed routing algorithm (a computer science perspective) are developed in this research. The main contribution of this paper is to develop a distributed change control workflow to maintain the consistence among designs in a collaborative design network.
There are some limitations in our approach. Firstly, the deadlock situation is not considered in our approach. The consistence of the relationships among designs might not occur if there is a looping relationship among participants. A well pre-defined decision tree to accommodate changes will probably be able to resolve the problem of deadlock. Secondly, we assume that the collaborative design begins with detail design activities instead of the conceptual design in product development. Different from detail design, conceptual design requires processing information from diverse sources in order to define the functional requirements, operating constraints, and evaluation criteria pertinent to accomplish a prescribed goal [10]. If the collaborations among JDMs move toward the conceptual design activities, a variant of proposed distributed change control workflow is required.
