Product Development Process Integration Using Design Structure Matrix

The Design Structure Matrix (DSM) is becoming a popular representation and analysis tool for system and process modelling. A DSM displays the relationships between components of a system in a compact, visual, and analytically advantageous format which is a square matrix with identical row and column labels. The main goal in basic DSM analysis is to minimize feedbacks by restructuring or re-architecting the process, which is to say by resequencing the rows and columns of the matrix. This widely practiced initial step in analysis is called partitioning, block diagonalization, or block triangularization, and it involves an algorithm for getting the DSM in an upper-triangular form to the extent possible, with a minimum number of subdiagonal marks pulled as close to the diagonal as possible and grouped in blocks. As a consequence, we have to identify the activities which are coupled, the loops and reorganize the matrix in order to reduce the feedbacks. An application example has been presented to illustrate the power of DSM for product development process integration.