Exploring threats to new product development, manufacturability, and development team processes within smart card-related industries

This study examines the potential threats to manufacturability (acceleration, product newness and complexity, outsourcing, and technological uncertainty) with the moderating effects of team integration and management within new product development/new product manufacturability (NPD/NPM) processes. The stated purposes of this study were as follows: (1) To add insight from successful NPD/NPM processes in terms of performance metrics associated with potential threats to manufacturability and on related issues of team integration and financial success and/or profitability factors. (2) Comparisons of Swink's (1999, 2000) results of selected threats to manufacturability and the moderating effects of team integration activities/processes on non-AIDC manufacturing industries with the results from this smart card and AIDC-related technologies study.; To perform the hypothesis-testing procedures similar to work completed by Swink (1999, 2000), principal-components factor analysis was used to load into a single construct, manufacturability, to serve as the dependent variable. The final loading included the following variables measured from the questionnaire: Product costs' goals, and achievement (multiplication of product-cost goals' aggressiveness and achievement), manufacturing goals and achievement (multiplication of product---manufacturabiIity goals' aggressiveness and achievement), quality goals and achievement (multiplication of product-quality goals' aggressiveness and achievement, few manufacturing problems---production start-up, product-features goals and achievement (multiplication of product-features goals' aggressiveness and achievement), and design-changes variable.; Overall, team integration issues in product development activities accounted for most of the explained variation in manufacturability. Since the construct variables associated factor scores of product acceleration, technological uncertainty, complexity, product newness, and design outsourcing was not found to be significant, their impacts on manufacturability are negligible. Especially the variables of product acceleration, technological uncertainty, complexity, and product newness are traditionally outside the immediate control of the firm's project managers. The team integration variables, as measured by top management factor scores, manufacturing involvement factor scores, collaborative working environment factor scores, and supplier influence factor scores, offered the most explained variance in the present study. These facts clearly indicate that manufacturability is a highly manageable entity and deserves further attention. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...