Evaluating cross-border product development practices

Abstract

This thesis aimed to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, improvement-areas, and root-causes of the case company´s produt development practices. The case company had one product design office each in two European countries, and oneshared location for manufacturing and materials sourcing in a third European country. The thesis consists of a failure analysis case study of four problematic product development projects. The scope included analyzing the projects from three major perspectives: the influence of operations strategy, of organizational structure, and of early actions in the projects. The scope also included an analysis of a minor perspective: the communication of project information. The study focused on experiences and information about the projects gathered from employees that were directly involved. Four interviews with representatives from upstream and downstream departments were conducted for each project. Conclusions were then drawn based on similarities and differences between the interviews and previous research into the main literature areas mentioned above. The study found that the nature of the problems in the individual projects varied greatly, as expected, and that there were indications of similarities and differences based on in which country the development projects originated in. However, no evidence supports the notion that any cultural differences were a root-cause. The researchers were able to conclude that the resource deployment had missed the target in the problematic projects, and that the formulation and communication of an operations strategy should assist the case company to avoid similar problems in the future. The study also concludes that the co-writing of project specifications should mitigate experienced uncertainties, and further recommends designing a new product development process to improve the execution of complex projects.