Methodology integration along the product development process: a case study

The growing complexity of the market, customer demands for increasing quality and service, together with the need of lower prices and more timely delivery challenge companies to improve performance on every aspect of their products and processes. Continuous advances in Information Technology (IT) allow companies to understand and exploit the changes of this fast-moving environment, providing the capabilities to efficiently support the company’s product lifecycle. In fact the management of product development in a whole-life-comprehensive perspective focuses on the fragmentation of existing tools and processes with the aim of gathering a fluid flow, an efficient definition and a ready use of product information throughout the organization. In such a context a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system can provide a valid support for the coordination and integration of processes and applications used to define and manage the virtual product with those used to manufacture and maintain the real product. As said, a PLM system/process is supported by several IT elements that can be grouped into three main categories: Product definition, Planning and Control and Infrastructure. In this paper the attention is put on methodologies and tools for product definition, and in particular, on the integration between traditional ones and those devoted to systematic innovation since they are assuming more and more importance in order to make companies able to innovate their products and processes.Thus, the aim of this work is to illustrate methodologies and tools involving several aspects of products and processes in a product lifecycle management context. In particular among the methodologies that can be adopted to support conceptual design and management of product variants, TRIZ methodology has been fruitfully employed, together with other tools (such as Design for Modularity, Lean Manufacturing or Risk Management) to create a new paradigm of product development. A step by step roadmap has been created to guide technicians along some of the phases of product life cycle in order to decrease time to market of customized products paying attention to cost and increasing quality standards.