Analysis of operations headcount in the new product introduction of servers and workstations

Abstract

An optimal coordination between a design team and a manufacturing team is necessary to minimize the overall cost of a project and to remain competitive. The type of coordination can range from one way communication to highly interactive teams. Within the workstation development group at Intel, a dedicated operations team coordinates the activity between the design team and the manufacturing team during a new product introduction. The goal of this thesis is to examine that role with particular attention to understanding the operations staffing level required to support a given development effort. This project analyzed the operations team's implementation of the coordination mechanism and derived a methodology for estimating the appropriate staffing level of the operations team. This methodology combined the experiences of the senior members of the group into a single objective representation. The model found that the project complexity was the primary driver for determining staffing levels. It also found a trend for future projects to be staffed at lower levels than similar past projects. This thesis also presents an academic framework for characterizing the mechanisms used to coordinate activity between a design group and a manufacturing group based on the level of interaction between the two groups. It casts the present activities of the operations group onto this framework to identify potential areas for improvement. Using this framework, we find that the complexity of the project determines not only the operations effort levels required to support a project, but also the type of activity which is optimal for supporting that project. From this we conclude that different projects require different implementations of the product development process.