Evaluation method of product development process with technology risk using product worth flow analysis

The present paper describes a systematic and comprehensive evaluation method of product development process based on the product definition at the early stage of product development in order to reduce the development time in large-scale and complicated product development with technology risk. The proposed evaluation method focused on the redesign and retrial of product components due to complicated relationship among components as the development risk leading to development delay. This proposed method evaluated the quantitative development risk using the product worth flow analysis which calculates the strength of interaction between components from the view point of engineering interaction and importance of customer worth and supported to decide the product development process and development strategy of each component. The paper shows two case studies in 2 types of micromachining system (lithography technology and cutting technology) developments. This proposed method contributes to the reduction of the feedback relationship across the product modules by technological alliance between the manufacturing process development in manufacturing firm and development of main components of manufacturing tool in comparison to the conventional manufacturing firm-led development process.