Identifying And Modeling Coordination To Optimize Organization Architecture In Global Product Development Projects

Changes in global economy and technological advances are stimulating increased geographic distribution of product design and development efforts pursuing Global Product Development(GPD)projects.For large organizations that design and develop complex products,this geographic distribution has added a new layer of complexity to coordinate dispersed team's work.The GPD organization is characterized by significant complexity in information sharing and information dependency among PD activities,thus preventing the identification of efficient offshoring locations of process and organization.Optimizing organization architecture for coordinating design process in distributed development system is one of important aspects in managing Global Product Development(GPD)projects.The research on these aspects has made a lot of achievements,but there are still some shortcomings in the theoretical methods and practical applications.In this thesis,design structure matrix(DSM)and random walk theories integrating other methods are presented to analyze the characteristics of distributed organization in GPD project.The main research contents are as follows:(1)To ensure efficient coordination between globally distributed organization,a firm must answer two critical questions:(i)How to identify coordination drivers and coordination barriers in GPD project,and(ii)How to measure the coordinative dependency among dispersed teams?This thesis investigates coordination needs through the process architecture performed by the organization.We apply the Design Structure Matrix(DSM)and Multi-Domain Matrix(MDM)to identify the interactions among the firm's departments/units and activities/tasks involved in related to product features and overlapped processes.By proposing concepts of daily overlapping working hours ratio and relative spatial distance between GPD teams characterizing coordination barriers,a new dependency rating scheme of GPD project is identified to evaluate the integrated coordinative dependency strength in organization DSM.We rely on an industrial example of packaging system at Canvana Group to illustrate the proposed models(2)Expanding the idea of structurally equivalent teams(i.e.,only considers technical dependencies from design activities)and role equivalent teams(i.e.,team's indirect dependency with their common performed activities),the thesis integrates these two approaches to build a new approach characterizing distributed team's coordination.We propose an integrated distribution network with activity layer and team layer to combine the involvement degree matrix based on design structure matrix(DSM),which characterizes team's involvement regarding their activities across temporal distance,with gain factors related to synchronous and asynchronous communication,reflecting the impact of time zone difference,the activity's relationship and synchronous/asynchronous factors on GPD organization.Furthermore coordination similarity DSM based on random walk method is explored for optimizing GPD.Wrapper Revamping Redesign project of Paradise Food Industry is used to illustrate our models.(3)A two-stage DSM clustering method is developed to help the firm optimize its GPD organization:the first-stage clustering criterion maximizes the added average dependency strength among relevant teams,and the second-stage clustering criterion minimizes the total coordination cost organization DSM,including both the coordination cost of intra-cluster and the coordination cost of extra cluster.The clustered organization DSM has improved the system architecture since most of dependencies are contained within cluster and the dependency strength between clusters is reduced significantly.The clustering results demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the complexity of management.However,each run of these clustering algorithm results on different number and structure of the clusters due to the sensitivity of scaling parameters.So,spectral clustering with similarity as input is used to overcome these limitations due to its unique clustering solution.Cases cited above are used to illustrate these two clustering approaches.The proposed models can additionally evaluate the integrated costs efficiency which can influence different strategies of offshoring(outsource a part of the process or of the organization).