روش تعیین معیار DEA برای برنامه ریزی و مدیریت پروژه توسعه محصول جدید تحت مدل کسب و کار سود غیر متمرکز

In today’s highly competitive marketplace, technology-driven organizations widely adopt decentralized profit-center business model. In order to complete a series of new product development (NPD) activities on time and within budgetary constraints, the NPD managers need an objective benchmarking approach to gain accurate perception on the relations of resource allocations, profits, costs and times for each NPD activity. Thus, this study employs the data envelopment analysis (DEA) concept to put forward a benchmarking planning and management methodology to optimize the NPD activities within a profit center for achieving the goal of maximal profit and satisfying the resource constraints. By applying the real case of the electric motor scooter NPD project, this research demonstrates the method’s real case application with superior results, comparing to other existing approaches.

For reducing the operating cost and enhancing the global competitiveness, most companies enlarge their sizes for pursuing the economy of scale. Further, in order to make a large organization more flexible and agile in the constantly changing market place, there is a noticeable trend toward decentralized decision making. Decentralization is to distribute decision-making authorities to sub-divisions and holds the division managers responsible for the decision outcomes. The profit center business model belongs to one of the decentralized organization structures. Nonetheless, the decision making in a decentralized organization must maintain its consistency and accuracy with acceptable and rational principles and criteria. Nowadays, new product development (NPD) departments of many companies have been converted into profit centers. In order to reduce the number of engineering changes and to shorten the NPD time, a NPD project manager needs to implement concurrent engineering by establishing NPD guidelines and constraints. At the same time, all profit centers must comply with these NPD rules to achieve design for X. In addition, a manager of the profit center, given a NPD domain, needs to estimate the cost, resources, revenue and delivery time for each NPD activity based on previous experiences and circumstantial judgment. Although, there are a lot of decision-making supporting approaches proposed to assist NPD activity planning, these models assume that activity times are specific time distributions and utilize the linear regression to build the relationship between activity times and costs. These methods cannot fit the real applications for NPD. In order to complete a series of NPD activities on time and in budget, the profit-center managers need a scientific approach to find the efficient activities to form the efficient frontier. In light of the frontier, the NPD manger can evaluate and estimate the minimum activity time as well as optimize resource allocation. Thus, this study presents a DEA-based benchmarking methodology to optimize the NPD time and resource planning within a profit center for achieving the goal of maximal profit. Finally, this research uses the electric motor scooter design project to illustrate the efficacy of the methodology presented in the paper.

In today’s highly competitive marketplace, multi-national companies widely adopt decentralized profit-center business model. The non-traditional business model leads to the dramatic changes of the NPD project management paradigms. NPD projects can be categorized into four types [13], i.e., new product platforms, derivatives of existing product platforms, incremental improvements to existing products and fundamentally new products. Many NPD projects belong to derivatives of existing product platforms. However, no research article/report is available to support the strategic planning and management of derivative NPD based on profit-center business model. In order to provide profit center managers an effective NPD planning and decision-making method, this paper develops a novel methodology for strategic NPD benchmarking based on decentralized profit-center business model. The key pre-requisite of this approach is that it needs the historical data of similar NPD activities, which can be easily obtained in industrial design companies with many completed derivative NPD projects. Finally, by applying the real case of the electric motor scooter design project, this study demonstrates the significant effectiveness of the DEA benchmarking for NPD project planning under the profit center model.