In present competitive environment, companies are under enormous pressure to reduce the time and cost of their product development. One method for reducing both time and cost is to develop an understanding of the flow of the design processes and the effects of the iterative subcycles that are found in complex design process. Once these aspects are understood, the design manager can make decisions that take advantage of decomposition, concurrent engineering, and parallel processing techniques to reduce the total time and the total cost of the design cycle. One tool that can aid in this decision-making process is the Design Structure Matrix(DSM). This method differs from traditional project-management tools because it focuses on representing information flows rather than work flows. The DSM method is an information exchange model that can express complex task relationships. This article will show how the tool works and how you can use the DSM to improve the management of complex product development projects using partitioning algorithms.
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