Decision making in product development : a review of the literature

For an effective product development process which identified the need of the customer, transferring the need to a product and making it producible, complex decisions are involved identifying reliable alternatives. In an intense market race, front loading of decision making is becoming more and more important to gain a strategic advantage position and to secure competitive power. It can be said that front loading of design decision making contributes greatly to the communication inside and outside a company when it practices a business philosophy and a business domain.(Kawarabayashi, et al, 2007) An important decision for many products is the specification of the product architecture which defines the primary modules and the interfaces between them. This decision not only affects the design of the product but also the process that will be followed during the rest of the product development project. Different processes launch different set of information-processing and decision making activities. The focus of this paper is to study the available decision making models/tools which are proposed by the various researches for product development processes. A loosely structured method was adopted as a mechanism for surveying the literature. The research and literature review papers and essays related to the decision making in the design and product development of the engineering design, operational management and the apparel design and product development from the journals were reviewed. It has acknowledged that the product development models are the usual approach to managing the product development organization, process, activities, tasks, and decision making in a sequential manner in order to decide the design of a product, how it should be manufactured and sol