Reviewing Complexity Costs – What Practice Needs and What Research Contributes

Abstract

Introducing more customized products causes complexity costs, which are hard to estimate and measure. Researchers and practitioners have therefore developed approaches to measure these costs. This paper reviews the current approaches and reveals a lack of a holistic view on the underlying problem and, hence, deficits to certain economic questions. We therefore suggest using the Extended Axiomatic Design (EAD) framework as an interdisciplinary model that adresses the economic consequences of variety-induced complexity.

Introducing a Framework to Generate and Evaluate the Cost Effects of Product (Family) Concepts

“…Collectively, the study proposes a framework that can be used as a testbed to generate and evaluate product concepts, while depicting existing product family design which includes economic parameters (Meyer et al, 2019, Meßerschmidt et al, 2020.…”

“…Economic evaluations are therefore necessary at an early stage to define promising configurations and to select the most profitable product concepts for NPD. Current approaches for product concept generation and evaluation are, however, restricted to single products (e.g., Suh, 2001, Gonçalves-Coelho andMourão, 2007), do not necessarily capture all requirements (e.g., Meßerschmidt et al, 2020), and frequently lack economic rigor when considering cost effects (e.g., Campagnolo and Camuffo, 2009). Generating product concepts draws on a large conceptual foundation and guidance from various studies (e.g., Otto et al, 2016, Krause et al, 2014, Moon and Simpson, 2014, but the literature has not addressed evaluations of these concepts to a great extent.…”

Development of a dynamic complexity costs assessment approach in aviation development

“…In summary, there are various methods that propose an approach for the development of modular product architectures and other methods that focus on the determination and evaluation of potential complexity costs. The above presentation has shown that existing modularization methods do not support all the requirements of a holistic concept development [22], especially when considering economic targets [23]. Methods such as Jiao [15] or the PKT Approach [2] support for the technical-functional development of modular product architectures and allow an evaluation of complexity costs, but do not continuously integrate variety-induced complexity costs as an economic target variable in their concept process steps.…”