Product development knowledge management portal and case studies to demonstrate the need for better design knowledge management using it

Abstract

Product development process is a complex one due to the involvement of highly coupled tasks and people over a certain period of time. So far there has been little success in capturing and storage of the knowledge that goes into making such a complex process in a easy to use and readily accessible way within a detailed framework. This thesis presents a product knowledge management portal to categorize such vast knowledge effectively to achieve those objectives. It thus serves as a map and a knowledge repository of the entire product development process starting with the evaluation of customer needs, functional requirements and constraints subsequently leading to specific design parameters, the process variables and the final output of the product itself. Within this framework is also contained the details of each of these individual processes, lessons learned from the past experiences, task division and interactions between people and tasks over time and the interconnections and links between these processes themselves. The thesis then studies three cases of products at two companies with different company cultures and size to learn how these companies manage the product development process knowledge using the above-developed framework. The results suggest the insufficiencies in different areas of knowledge backed by quantitative data. It also points out the common results and differences among the way companies manage the product development knowledge.