Managing concurrent execution of multiple activities in product development process

Many companies adopt concurrent engineering in their product-development projects in order to reduce time to market. Concurrent engineering requires careful management, since the uncertainty of transferred information leads to rework and renders a development process complex. Most of the existing studies on concurrent engineering have analyzed overlapping between two activities. The present study expanded the research scope by modeling the developmental process of the concurrent execution of multiple activities as the result of management decisions, the overlapping ratio, and the information transfer frequency. When multiple activities are overlapped, it is more difficult to model a development process, since the uncertainty of cascaded information has impacts on many activities. The quantitative model developed in the present study provides insights into the uncertainty of information and the product-development process. Based on the generalized process model for multiple-activity overlapping, the optimal decision to minimize project duration was considered. As a solution to the dilemma of the high computational burden of considering all feasible decision sets, this paper proposes a myopic heuristic. The project management heuristic proposed in this paper is intended to assist managers in the decision-making process, as well as reducing the intermediate deadlines in project main plan.