Estimation of product development cycle time resulting from early supplier involvement

Early supplier involvement (ESI) is widely applied to improve the product development process and has been proved to be able to shorten product development cycle time. The current study presents a systematic approach to support enterprises in selecting suitable tasks for implementing ESI. In order to estimate the influence of ESI on product development cycle time, the proposed method analyses complex product development processes to determine how to implement collaborative design appropriately via design structure matrix. This approach integrates an analysis of the binary design structure matrix, two-dimensional variables (sensitivity and variability), and the amount of overlapping of the tasks to discuss complex issues associated with product development cycle time. By applying the influence analysis to overlapping, the study identifies suitable tasks and the priority of each task to collaborative design. Finally, a simplified case study is discussed to demonstrate how enterprises can utilize the proposed method.