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The discussion about increased product complexity in Western European companies has been omnipresent for decades. This is due to ever new demands (real or c- ceived) from the market and new possibilities (technical and others) open to the p- viders of products and services to come up fast with very specific solutions. The m- agement of this complexity inside the company so as to achieve a balance between the market benefits of more customer specific solutions and the internal costs induced by this is still a big challenge. After years of research in this area there is still a lack of tools to help practitioners to take decisions about the right degree of complexity for a product or the right design of a product architecture. Mr. Marti brings together three perspectives on this topic in an easily understa- able and communicable way: The strategy of the company (combined with the mat- ity of the product), the functionality, and the physical complexity on a component level. The visualization in a complexity matrix is an important new tool especially for fostering the understanding for complexity issues in a company! With this book Mr. Marti has come up with an outstanding contribution to product complexity management, which is crucial for the future competitiveness of companies in Western Europe. I hope that this book will find a broad distribution as well in pr- tice as in theory for the sake of our countries! Prof. Dr.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
From the contents:
Complexity as a challenge for enterprises
The importance of product architecture
Product development-oriented concepts
Complexity management model
Case studies
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Dr. Michael Marti promovierte bei Prof. Dr. Fritz Fahrni am Institut für Technologiemanagement der Universität St. Gallen. Er ist als Produktmanager bei Siemens tätig.
Zusammenfassung
The task of managing complexity in enterprises receives special attention from theorists and practitioners alike. Creating products that fulfill the market requirements but do not cause excessive complexity costs poses a major challenge to managers.
Michael Marti presents a complexity management model that is based on the reasoning that product architecture determines to a considerable extent how external complexity is translated into physical products. The model demonstrates a procedure to optimize a product’s architecture and is applied to several industrial products. It is able to shed light on the sources of complexity within a product’s architecture, and the same or even increased customer benefit can be delivered while causing less internal complexity.
