Process assessment in globally competitive product development

Globalization of industry and the manufacturing environment is spurring intensification of international competition in the designing products. This inevitably causes the changes in the style and characteristics of design activities. We have already proposed a methodology for quantitative estimation of design load and efficiency in our previous work. In this paper, we survey the design processes for professional-use devices and discuss recent design process innovation by introducing an index to measure the efficiency of design optimization. This progress is explained as the transition of design type from “fulfilling the design requirements” to “searching for the optimum design solution.” For the latter design type, rational decision making at the early design stages is particularly important for achieving the optimum design solution efficiently. In this context, finally, the influence of uncertainty in decision making on design time is quantitatively evaluated by treating it as a probability density function, in conjunction with the proposed estimation methodology. We name the quantitative approach shown in this paper “Design Process Assessment,” and we aim to systematize it in order to analyze and optimize design processes based on rational indices.