NPD and PLM

The field of NPD has been defined as including the set of activities "beginning with the perception of a market opportunity and ending in the production, sales, and delivery of a product" (Ulrich and Eppinger 2000, p. 2). Since it covers such wide organizational areas, the dominant models in NPD emphasize an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry and call for contributions from most business functional areas.

Since the Internet technology became widely available in mid 1990s, there have been fundamental changes in organizations. The virtual organization is often described as the one that is replete with external ties (Coyle and Schnarr 1995), managed via teams that are assembled and disassembled according to needs (Grenier and Metes 1995, Lipnack and Stamps 1997), and consisting of employees who are physically dispersed from one another (Clancy 1994, Barner 1996). The result is a "company without walls" (Galbraith 1995) that acts as a "collaborative network of people" working together, regardless of location or who

"owns" them (Bleeker 1994, Grenier and Metes 1995, Hedberg et al. 1997). Beginning with these assumptions, it is interesting to study how communication processes and organizational design interplay in the new, "virtual" enterprise (DeSanctis G, Monge P, 1999).

Developing a new product successfully is always a challenge for a firm. For successful NPD, a firm must be able to develop an innovative product that appeals to the customer and manufactures it in large quantity in order to reap profit from the mass market (Verworn et al., 2008). Under the collaborative structure and virtual organizational environment, the major challenge for project team about NPD is how to integrate the technical knowledge in the project to generate the organization’s benefit. In such collaborative structure, the organization can perform two kinds of managerial patterns: Top-down and Bottom-up. In Top-down mode, the management level develops organizational behavior patterns and monitors the project, and makes timely decision on the project. In Bottom-up mode, individual users react and adapt to the system norm.

Integrating knowledge for technologies under development faces many challenges.

Previous studies have found many unsolved problems in the management of NPD. In Table 1, we can find that the managerial issues of NPD management surrounds by the substantial topics of project integration mechanisms, marketing environment changes, and technology

development. Therefore, the project is with high uncertainty on its information related factors during the NPD development process.

The problems outlined in Table 1 indicate that product development is an interdisciplinary field where IT can serve as a supporting platform for their solution (Nambisan, 2003). In the NPD process the PLM systems link product design information with customer needs, processing data, cost data and resource planning data and make them accessible to everyone inside and outside the firm that requires the information at the right time (Serrano and Fischer, 2007). Therefore, PLM is a powerful approach for breaking through organizational and technical barriers to collaborative New Product Process Development, and it also helps identify and communicate sources of knowledge.

However, the project team members come from different technical backgrounds, and are under the restriction of disclosuring the enterprise technique secrets. Although the knowledge and technologies in various stages of NPD are integrated through the collaboration model embedded in the PLM system, quite often anticipated benefits about collaboration and integration are not achieved. Although operation secrecy has to be maintained in the product development process, people still can make use of the collaborative functions of the PLM system to gain benefits. Thus, using the collaborative functions properly for integrating information and technology resources may lead to solutions for extensibility and maintenance issues in NPD.

Table 1 : Common NPD problem and improvement suggestion

Problem Nature Description Improvement suggestion

Collaboration Lack of interaction management and collaborative design mechanisms between the project teams.

To improve creativity and efficiency through seamless

collaboration, which is the key of NPD success (Takayama, 2002).

To build up an environment of collaborative design to help detect problems, and to foster perception of the team (Chiu, 2002).

Knowledge Management

The core techniques and knowledge are not easily accumulated in the project process.

To change the R&D management style from technology centered to a more interactive model, and cumulate knowledge through

interactions (Nobelius, 2004).

To adopt interactive management style for NPD (Stummer, 2003).

To build up a team communication network in order to stimulate team creation (Leenders, 2003).

Knowledge transfer within an inter-organizational team can not be accomplished without a common lexicon or a mutual understanding of each other’s domain knowledge.

Organizational integration practices like boundary spanner and boundary object can be implemented to promote knowledge sharing and coordination of NPD process (Merminod and Rowe, 2010;

Hoopes and Postrel, 1999; Carlile, 2004; Levina and Vaast, 2005).

Uncertainty The short product life cycle cannot quickly cope with market variances.

To be synchronous the product developing process with the market need in order to keep competiveness of the company (Kesser, 2002;

Borwning, 2002).

The top manager needs to create organization visions, which will seamlessly integrate work progress with market demands (Nellore,

2001).

The schedule of R&D is hard to control. Due to the high uncertainty in R&D, organizations need to use a comprehensive market development stragegy as the basis for developing the blue print of future product development in order to reduce the uncertainty (Nobelius, 2006).

The manager needs to establish an effective and specialized communication mechanism, suggest correct strategic direction, control and monitor project progress, and adjust project goals timely (Bonner, 2002).

Information Effectively

A lack of necessary information for the new product In the high-tech domain, the core competency directly influences the future competition position of the company, also deciding the way of product line (Quélin, 2000).

To keep on improving the R&D process, strengthen the competitive advantage of new products, and deliberate the future growth of products (Chapman, 2004).

To use the Internet performance measurement tool which can provide synchronously and immediately information to product developers, and thus helps collaborations and obtain latest information for solving product related problems (Shi, 2001) . Performance

Evaluation

R&D performance cannot be immediately assessed. To establish project evaluation mechanisms that can be used to deal with project uncertainty and uncontrolable factors (Loch, 2002).

To establish specific evaluation mechanisms for evaluating R&D performance (Millar, 2001).

To establish four key performance factors in the NPD process:

finance, degree of target market acceptance, degree of subjective market acceptance, and levels of product (Huang, 2004).