Product Design Process, The Progress Of Management Studies

With increasing market competition, time, quality, cost, service and environment is becoming more and more important. To ensure that product development is carried out on time is one of the critical factors for enterprises to win the market competition. Schedule management is an important approach to guaranting the product development plan.Firstly, the contents and the techniques of schedule management are summarized. The differences of schedule management between serial and concurrent product development are discussed. The integration of schedule management and other aspects in product development such as quality management, resource management is studied. The factors that cause the delay of the product development schedule are analysed.Secondly, the paper conducts researches on one of the key technologies -time quota. The function of product design time quota is discussed and the influencing factors is analysed. The definition and a simple formulation of product design time quota is established in the paper. A framework of computer-aided product design time quota system is proposed based on the time quota system in manufacturing. Thirdly, product design schedule management in the Concurrent Engineering environment is studied. Product Data Management and the relationship between PDM and schedule management is analyzed. Based on the traditional Product Structure Tree (PST), an extended PST is proposed. A product design schedule management technique is studied. The mechanism and framework is proposed. The advantage of the technique is discussed. Finally, on the basis of the product design time quota and the schedule management based on Product Structure Tree, a prototype system is accomplished by Visual C++6.0 and in the Windows2000 environment. It is applied in the tailstock of a lathe and the feasibility is tested.