Development Projects in SMEs

Abstract

Innovations and rapid product introduction are keywords for competitiveness in many industries. In larger companies with R&D departments these have often been organized as projects with dedicated resources. However, in smaller companies the project organization has been challenging, as their ability to dedicate resources from e.g. operational activities is more difficult. This is more and more evident in industries where the requirements of rapid product and process development is more demanding. In several research projects, we have investigated different approaches and enablers for a more dynamic way to meet the development requirements. Keywords for these projects have been modularity, inter-organizational collaboration, product-/and process intelligence, and process integration. In this paper, we have a particular focus on how development projects could be integrated in the operations planning, where these development activities become a part of the operations when resources (personnel and equipment) need to be "co-utilized" from production.

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“…It is necessary to compress development cycles [5] to optimize the vessel development process towards high-quality products without compromising the financial feasibility of the developments. In recent years, concepts like concurrent engineering [6] have been applied to the domain of vessel development [7]. These advances are complemented by investigations on the integration of product behavior knowledge into a product development process [8,9].…”