Challenging global competition: Tune up your product development

Maturing electronics industry and global scale of operations create a new and challenging business environment. Production capacity is available on a competitive base; it will no more be a strategic advantage for product-based industries. Thus, it can be seen that the product itself is becoming the new competitive factor. Product developing companies seeking for competitive advantage push product performance and functionality, often with the help of advanced technology. All the product-related activities will increase in demand: numerous technologies, skills, and competencies are required in the development section. The companies have to search for new methods and tools to manage their sophisticated products, and they also must learn to rely on resource networks and co-operation partners. Techniques, models, methods, standards and best practices related to systems engineering and improvement of product-life-cycle management, in particular targeted to development of advanced and mass-produced consumer products, are hard to find. The scope of necessary activities is wide, and there is a specific need for experience reports and application cases. Thus, we propose to develop a framework for collecting, evaluating, maintaining, and distributing an expert knowledge base of the topic. This knowledgebase will include techniques, templates, and methods to support practical process deployment tasks. The knowledgebase shall not contain just static "one-type-of" method chains, but provide the pool of methods which can be searched according to the needs of various improvement activities, cumulatively updated to keep the company's process knowledge that has been built during the development.