Incorporating design outsourcing decisions within the design of collaborative design processes

The product design process plays a central role in ensuring that new products are realized with improved quality, in a short lead-time and with costs kept to a minimum. Designing the design process is an essential ingredient to ensure sustained competitiveness of a company. The collaborative nature of today's product development environment complicates the design of design processes. In this paper, it is proposed that design outsourcing and collaboration decisions should form a critical component of modeling and synthesizing collaborative design processes. An approach to modeling collaborative design processes is proposed based on the use of design nodes. The approach allows an ongoing design process to be modeled facilitating dynamic decision making on how the design process should progress accounting for the state of the design problem, design process factors, collaboration and design outsourcing factors.