Literature-based identification of success-relevant influencing factors of distributed product development

摘要

Increasingly complex products and processes, tougher international competition and increasing customer requirements are some of the trends leading to the current organizational change. Companies are more and more conducting their development activities across locations and national borders. The aim is to optimally exploit the potential created by the changed environment and to gain an advantage over the competitors. Furthermore, companies are facing additional challenges, such as increased organizational effort, a lack of personal contact and the resulting communication delays. In order to be able to react flexibly to the changed boundary conditions, companies are increasingly trying to implement agile measures. The implementation of these measures and the addressing of the heterogeneity of the distributed development environments increase the complexity of the entire product development process. In order to successfully master this complexity in the transformation process, the question arises which influencing factors are decisively contributing to the success of distributed development processes. This contribution is therefore dedicated to the literature-based identification of the success-relevant influencing factors in distributed product development. In addition, the success-relevant influencing factors were assigned to the dimensions people, technology and organization to further be able to investigated what effect changing an influencing factor has on the dimensions and thus also on the influencing factors classified under them. Finally, the collection of success-relevant influencing factors indicates which influencing factors must be considered when adapting processes, methods and tools as part of the operation system of the product development process to the prevailing distributed development situation. Additionally, it must be considered that the transformation process can only be successful if the integrated consideration of the three dimensions technology, organization as well as the individual people affected by change as the center of product development is taken into account.