Identifying Design Strategies to Mitigate the Risk Introduced into New Product Development by Suppliers

For every organization, an efficient and effective product development process is a key to generate and manage growth opportunities. Often strategic relationships with key suppliers and partners are required as organizations do not have all the competencies that are crucial to the development of a product. This is particularly true for Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) and Joint Development Manufacturer (JDM) supplier relationships, which are characterized by a high degree of supplier involvement in every stage of product development. If the interactions with these key suppliers are not managed properly, there is significant risk that the endeavor will end up with missing budget, schedule and cost goals, particularly for complex systems. Little attention in the literature, however, has been given to the risk introduced by suppliers into the product development process nor mitigating this risk through appropriate design strategies. This thesis addresses the need to develop a risk assessment methodology that would not only identify areas of concern but also identify potential design strategies to mitigate risk. In this work, metrics are derived to quantify the relative importance, degree of change, difficulty of change and degree of coupling for engineering metrics at system and subsystem levels. From these metrics, a framework is developed to quantitatively assess the risk due to supplier interactions. In addition, design strategies identified in the literature are characterized in terms of these same metrics to determine the design strategy which is most suited to mitigate the risk associated with a particular EM. Finally, a case study is presented for the hypothetical development of a 3D printer, to assess initial feasibility and utility of the framework

Teledesic : a product, process, and supply chain design methodology

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 44).by Lance Clifford Mansfield.S.M

The Knowledge Application and Utilization Framework Applied to Defense COTS: A Research Synthesis for Outsourced Innovation

Purpose -- Militaries of developing nations face increasing budget pressures, high operations tempo, a blitzing pace of technology, and adversaries that often meet or beat government capabilities using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies. The adoption of COTS products into defense acquisitions has been offered to help meet these challenges by essentially outsourcing new product development and innovation. This research summarizes extant research to develop a framework for managing the innovative and knowledge flows. Design/Methodology/Approach – A literature review of 62 sources was conducted with the objectives of identifying antecedents (barriers and facilitators) and consequences of COTS adoption. Findings – The DoD COTS literature predominantly consists of industry case studies, and there’s a strong need for further academically rigorous study. Extant rigorous research implicates the importance of the role of knowledge management to government innovative thinking that relies heavily on commercial suppliers. Research Limitations/Implications – Extant academically rigorous studies tend to depend on measures derived from work in information systems research, relying on user satisfaction as the outcome. Our findings indicate that user satisfaction has no relationship to COTS success; technically complex governmental purchases may be too distant from users or may have socio-economic goals that supersede user satisfaction. The knowledge acquisition and utilization framework worked well to explain the innovative process in COTS. Practical Implications – Where past research in the commercial context found technological knowledge to outweigh market knowledge in terms of importance, our research found the opposite. Managers either in government or marketing to government should be aware of the importance of market knowledge for defense COTS innovation, especially for commercial companies that work as system integrators. Originality/Value – From the literature emerged a framework of COTS product usage and a scale to measure COTS product appropriateness that should help to guide COTS product adoption decisions and to help manage COTS product implementations ex post

Multi Agent Systems in Logistics: A Literature and State-of-the-art Review

Based on a literature survey, we aim to answer our main question: “How should we plan and execute logistics in supply chains that aim to meet today’s requirements, and how can we support such planning and execution using IT?†Today’s requirements in supply chains include inter-organizational collaboration and more responsive and tailored supply to meet specific demand. Enterprise systems fall short in meeting these requirements The focus of planning and execution systems should move towards an inter-enterprise and event-driven mode. Inter-organizational systems may support planning going from supporting information exchange and henceforth enable synchronized planning within the organizations towards the capability to do network planning based on available information throughout the network. We provide a framework for planning systems, constituting a rich landscape of possible configurations, where the centralized and fully decentralized approaches are two extremes. We define and discuss agent based systems and in particular multi agent systems (MAS). We emphasize the issue of the role of MAS coordination architectures, and then explain that transportation is, next to production, an important domain in which MAS can and actually are applied. However, implementation is not widespread and some implementation issues are explored. In this manner, we conclude that planning problems in transportation have characteristics that comply with the specific capabilities of agent systems. In particular, these systems are capable to deal with inter-organizational and event-driven planning settings, hence meeting today’s requirements in supply chain planning and execution.supply chain;MAS;multi agent systems

Technological revolutions and the evolution of industrial structures. Assessing the impact of new technologies upon size, pattern of growth and boundaries of the firms

In this work we discuss the impact of the new ICT techno-economic paradigm upon the vertical and horizontal boundaries of the firm and ask whether the change in the sources of competitive advantage has resulted in changes in the size distribution of firms and also in the degree of concentration of industries. Drawing both on firm-level and national statistical data we assess the evolution of the overall balances between the activities which are integrated within organizations and those which occur through market interactions. While the new paradigm entails ``revolutionary'' changes in the domain of technology, the modification in industrial structures has been somewhat more incremental. Certainly, the vertical and horizontal boundaries of firms have changed and together one is observing a turnover in the club of biggest world firms accounting also for a shift in the relative importance of industrial sectors. Nonetheless, we do not observe an abrupt fading of the Chandlerian multidivisional corporation in favour of smaller less-integrated firms.New techno-economic paradigm; Organizational change; Vertical integration; Boundaries of the firm; Visible hand.

Design of a Global Supply Chain for the Unexpected

Supply chains (SCs) play a crucial role in business operations and economies around the globe. They are in constant change and face challenges such as recurrent risks and disruption risks. The disruptive risks tend to cascade and propagate upstream and downstream of the disruption point. Due to the difficulty of calculating probabilities of disruptions, many decision makers prefer to underestimate disruptive risks. Losses of billions of dollars are accounted for each year due to the disruptive risks. These losses highlight the importance and need of having decision support systems and tools that can aid to design, model and analyze SCs that can cope with disruptions and their effects through all the stages. This research aims at developing new methods for designing and analyzing SCs that are prepared for unexpected events. It provides new insights into the methods to estimate the impact of possible disruptions during designing and planning stages. It further proposes complexity, robustness and resilience measures which facilitate the comparison between different SC designs in different scenarios. The significance of this research is to provide more stable production environments and develop the capability to prepare for unexpected events. Particular focus is given to natural disasters due to the magnitude and variety of impacts they could cause. Hence, a mathematical programming model that designs SCs and product architectures is proposed. The objective function is to minimize the disaster risk score of natural disasters (which depends on the geographical location of each SC entity and its associated “World Risk Index”). Also, a goal programming model is derived from the initial model. The goal programming model allows the inclusion of the decision-makers’ risk attitudes and costs to balance the decisions. The results obtained from the model showed that the SC and product architecture designs affect each other. Additionally, it was demonstrated that different risk-attitudes could lead to different SC designs. To achieve harmonious designs between SCs and products while remaining robust and controlling complexity, a novel methodology to assess structural SC complexity and robustness is presented using network analysis. This methodology includes the evaluation of different product architectures. Consequently, managers can choose the SC/product architecture that has a balanced level of complexity and robustness. It is worth noting that complexity and higher costs are needed to protect against disruptions. Moreover, the results demonstrated that the modular architecture is preferable as it has a balanced level of complexity and robustness. To analyze the dynamic behaviour of the SCs, a system dynamics framework is introduced to evaluate the impacts of disruptions in assembly SCs. Consequently, a pragmatic tool that provides organizational support is proposed. This framework enables the examination of full and partial disruptions and the incorporation of expediting orders after a disturbance. The SC performance indicators are the output of the proposed model. These indicators make the comparison between different scenarios easy. The usage of the framework and the findings can serve to define disruption policies, and assist in the decisions relating to the SC design. After running several scenarios, it was determined that the disruptions happening in the downstream levels have more impacts on the SC performance than the disruptions in the upstream levels. Hence, the disruption policies for the downstream levels should have higher priority. Moreover, it was demonstrated that expediting after disruptions could affect more the already damaged SC performance. Finally, to evaluate the SC performance and costs when facing disruptions, an index to assess SC resilience cost is provided. The metric considers the fulfilment rate in each period of each SC entity and its associated cost. This index allows comparison between different scenarios in the SC

Proof-of-Concept Application - Annual Report Year 1

In this document the Cat-COVITE Application for use in the CATNETS Project is introduced and motivated. Furthermore an introduction to the catallactic middleware and Web Services Agreement (WS-Agreement) concepts is given as a basis for the future work. Requirements for the application of Cat-COVITE with in catallactic systems are analysed. Finally the integration of the Cat-COVITE application and the catallactic middleware is described. --Grid Computing