Managing product development complexities through restructuring information exchange and adopting configuration principle

Increased customer demands and stiffer competition forcing manufacturing firms to rapid develop and deliver their products to the markets. Modern products are also become increasingly complicated and incorporating many newer technologies. To comply with these complexities, firms need to harness better ways to tackle the product development (PD) processes. Steps towards faster information exchange and adopting configuration principle could triggers to reduce these complexities. In this paper, generalized concepts and applicability of matrix based tools such as; design structure matrix (DSM), domain mapping matrix (DMM), multi-domain matrix (MDM) are discussed along with the effectiveness of configuration principle. Two examples are presented in order to demonstrate the usefulness and practicality of matrix based tools and configuration scenarios in PD processes.