Optimal deployment of parallel teams in new product development

Abstract

Speed in product development can be defined as the thin line that determines success or failure in many fast growing industries today. Strategies like set based concurrent engineering and parallel team deployment have been used to accelerate new product introduction by successful companies like Toyota. In the current paper, these two strategies are combined to investigate the impact of generating sets of alternatives using parallel teams on the revenue generated from new product development. The trade-off between cost and speed of development due to deployment of parallel teams in product development using the Multi Armed Bandit framework are also explored. For sequential and overlapped development strategies, quantitative models to qetermine the optimum number of product development teams at different stages of development have been constructed using the Gittins Index strategy. These models have been tested empirically using hypothetical data and the results show that the higher flexibility induced quality due to larger set of design alternatives results in higher rewards, despite the higher cost of deploying multiple teams.