Quantification of cost and risk during product development

In response to customers' rising demands for more customization and quality, companies are making more frequent changes to their products. A framework for a decision support system (DSS) which helps product development managers to understand the cost and risk of change is described and illustrated with a simple example of a thermoflask. The DSS assesses project performance metrics, such as development effort, development time, product cost and revenue, customer satisfaction, profit margin, and risk. The system allows the recalculation of these performance metrics when engineering change occurs during the creation of new design solutions. The assessment of different design solutions can then be performed by comparing the change in performance metrics. The DSS integrates methods from quality function deployment, functional analysis, and risk assessment that increases product knowledge during design stages in order to calculate the effects of engineering change, and thus, to support design managers in decision making.