Qualitative analysis of the design process

Numerous interactions and information transfers among activities can be identified in a design process. To reduce the product development time and cost and increase product quality, the degree of interaction and the nubmer of information transfers among design activities have to be reduced. The purpose of this research is to analyze the design process and provide guidelines for its improvement. The IDEF3 methodology is used to model the design process that is further represented with an incidence matrix. A qualitative analysis approach (critical analysis, concurrency analysis, and decomposition) is used to analyze the process structure and improve it without considering the time aspect. The critical analysis determines potential activities that may delay design project and provides suggestions for improvement of the design process. The concurrency analysis detects activities that can be performed in parallel and optimizes the sequence of design activities. The decomposition approach presented in the paper detects parallelism among activities that reduces the product development time.