Workload balancing procedure for product design processes and its application

Many world manufacturers are trying to refine their product development function in terms of business process reengineering through concurrent engineering, information infrastructure enrichment, and traditional improvement activities, as one of the effective activities to cope with the recent volatile market environment. To support these efforts, this paper proposes a prototype procedure of workload balancing for product design processes, which consists of operations network analysis, simulation-based improvement and traditional PDCA continuous improvement cycles. Relevance of the proposed procedure is investigated and evaluated through case studies of engineering-to-order manufacturing companies.