Product Development Processes Management Based on Design Structure Matrix (DSM) Method

The design and development of complex products require the efforts and collaboration of hundreds of participants from diverse backgrounds resulting in complex relationships among both people and tasks. One method for reducing both time and cost is to develop an understanding of the flow of the product development processes and the effects of the iterative subcycles that are found in complex product development processes. Once these aspects are understood, the manager can make decisions that take advantage of decomposition, concurrent engineering, and parallel processesing techniques to reduce the total time and the total cost of the design cycle. One tool that can aid in this decision-making processes is the design structure matrix(DSM). This article will show how the tool works and how you can use the DSM to improve the management of complex product development projects using partitioning algorithms.