A Method to Set up a Complexity Index to Improve Decision-making Performance

Engineering companies face the challenges of increasing product variety and technology induced increasing complexity of products. If the company is not able to manage this complexity within the design process it will cause productivity losses and rising complexity costs along the value-chain. Lack of information and information asymmetries lead to sub-optimal decision-making and thus to sub-optimal product-production-system designs. Companies struggle to evaluate product designs out of a broader, multi-functional perspective to derive the optimal design for the customer and company. The central question which needs to be solved is how companies can overcome these disadvantages in the early stages of product and process development. Based on the existing product design assessment methodologies proposed by academic and industrial communities this paper addresses these problems by developing a novel concept to improve decision-making performance in the early design phase by integrating the complexity perspective into decision-making. The paper delivers a guideline how to build up a complexity index to condense complex information.