An Exploratory Study Of The Specifications Process In A Customer-Supplier Collaborative New Product Development

In this paper we focus on the collaborative process of definition of specifications of a complex product. The aim of the paper is to improve the understanding of the specifications elaboration process and particularly the interactions between customer and supplier project teams. A case study has been analyzed to precise the collaborative definition of specifications through respective contributions of the client and the supplier team members. We have described the interactions between customer and supplier project teams by combining a collaborative concept development process with the formalism of the blueprint method in order to highlight the roles of each company. Our conclusions pointed out three patterns, (1) the degree of interactions between customer and supplier project teams vary in the upstream phases of the New Product Development process, (2) the use of narrow-based definition of specifications enables to increase the trust from the customer towards the supplier, and (3) the collaborative specifications definition process is seen as a co-evolution approach, where needs, specifications and architecture evolve in parallel.