Complexity management in variant-rich product development

Complexity is the paradigm of the 21st century and has been discussed in several fields of research. During the last years, increasing complexity in manufacturing companies has been one of the biggest issues in science and practice. Companies in high-technology marketplaces are confronted with technology innovations, dynamic environmental conditions, changing customer requirements, globalization of markets and competitions, as well as market uncertainty, inducing an increasing amount of complexity. Manufacturing companies cannot escape these trends. In today’s highly competitive environment, it is fundamental for company’s success to develop and launch new products quickly and with customer’s individual settings to the market. The companies cope with these trends by developing new product variants, which lead to an increased complexity in the company and in product development. Complexity is influenced by internal and external sources of complexity, so-called complexity drivers. Complexity drivers have an influence on companies and the total value chain. Managing a system’s complexity requires an optimum fit between internal and external complexity. Identifying, analyzing and understanding complexity drivers is the first step for complexity management’s development and implementation. For managing and optimizing company’s complexity, a vast number of different single approaches is applied for different purposes. Complexity management is a strategic issue for companies to be competitive. The main important strategies for single approaches’ application are complexity reduction, mastering and avoidance. Complexity management requires approaches for complexity’s understanding, simplification, transformation and evaluation. A successful complexity management approach enables a balance between external market’s complexity and internal company’s complexity. The purpose of this dissertation is to close existing gaps in scientific literature by providing a complexity management in variant-rich product development. Therefor, a systematic literature review was performed regarding the issues ‘complexity drivers in manufacturing companies and along the value chain and their effects on company’s complexity’, ‘application of specific single approaches and their targeted strategy’, as well as ‘approaches for complexity management and especially for resource planning’. An empirical research was conducted to document the current state in the German manufacturing industry regarding the issues ‘complexity drivers in product development and their effects on company’s complexity’ and ‘application of specific single approaches for complexity management’. The empirical data was collected through questionnaires between 2015 and 2016. The empirical findings are compared with literature to identify commonalities and differences. Based on literature’s results, a new general approach for managing complexity in variant-rich product development was developed to bring the relevant steps for complexity handling in a sequence. In this approach, complexity in product development is systematically analyzed and evaluated to create conditions for target-oriented managing and controlling of complexity. Furthermore, the general complexity management approach is modified and structurally optimized to establish a target-oriented approach for resource planning in variant-rich product development. The new approaches are applied in the automotive industry to verify the results and approach’s applicability