Problem: Action Direction in Product Creation

Operating in a global market that is characterized by high competition, growing customer demands and steadily shortening product life cycles, an efficient management of product creation processes plays a key role for manufacturers of complex products. According to Ohms, product creation processes encompass all activities prior to series production of a product, starting from the initial product conception, shifting over to product engineering activities, as well as planning of manufacturing equipment, supplier integration and final production ramp-up. Two salient characteristics of product creation processes are (a) the high amount of division of labour involved and (b) their immense knowledge intensity.

In order to successfully keep a product project, e.g. the development of a new car series, on schedule and to securely carry the project to its agreed start of production, mechanisms that foster the coordinated collaboration of all actors within product creation are – due to the inherent high complexity of such projects – of high importance. A core instrument employed is so-called ‘product creation process models’, in which the coordination and temporal synchronization of the major process steps, as well as their causal dependencies, are formalized according to a stage gate approach. Knowledge, such as that employed in these process models, is the basal precondition for action. Process models serve as an important instrument in project management to plan, steer and report product creation projects.