Anyone have experiences in modeling and simulating the New Product Development process?
I am looking for those that have attempted modeling and simulation of the development process to look for possibilities in streamlining their efforts. Experience in the semiconductor industry would be ideal, although I would welcome inputs from any industry that has modeled the New Product Development process.
1) What tools did you use?
2) Did you find value in the effort?
3) Any unexpected findings?
Clarification added 1 month ago:
Thanks for the answers so far. I wanted to clarify that the question is related to modeling of the baseline development process from concept to revenue, or any subset of that. I am looking for any experience with simulations of the decisions, tools, sequences, preparations, requirements gathering, engineering requirements and so on in order to look at various what-if scenarios. Essentially I am looking at ways of analyzing potential procedural/methodology changes to the standard development process prior to implementation. This modeling is not for a specific product or project.
Good Answers (3)
Jeff, I am glad to see someone talking about this topics. We did attempt to model the full semiconductor product development lifecycle from concept to delivery. It's an extremely complicated problem (too deep a value chain along with almost unfathomable number of variables spanning numerous disciplines). We used C++ to implement stochastic models of various workflows. There is definitely value in it, we were especially successful in modeling the functional validation workflow. It helped with predictability and status reporting.
The best part of the model is that it gets better and better as you run more and more projects through it.
Unexpected finding is that we had to invent a process framework and initiative modeling framework to make the overall lifecycle work properly.
If you are interested only on scheduling and resource management part then I suggest you check these guys out:
http://www.numetrics.com
Clarification added 27 days ago:
Hi Thomas, Thanks for your comment. Flexibility in doing whatever we want to do was one of the factors guiding our choices. Jeff's question was wise: he inquired about unexpected findings. As we ventured into it we ran into lots of unexpected findings, findings of the type where the existing process modelers will not do a decent job if not fail completely.
I would like to draw your attention to Rational (now IBM rational) which provides a process modeling platform. Although it can model any process, however in reality, they do work best for which they were conceived: software development using RUP.
One may argue how effective & productive they are, nonetheless companies like Rational, Mercury and a host of others are providing valuable solution in the software development process space. Interestingly not a single solution provider in the semiconductor space (to the best of our knowledge). We believe the primary reasons are two fold: quickly advancing technology nodes and a very deep development value chain in a very complex environment. To find a solution for what you are looking for one needs to figure out a way how to decouple the development endeavor from underlying "raw technology" so that endeavor to endeavor carry over is possible while at the same time allowing enough controlled coupling with the technology so that data/information/knowledge delivered is real, meaningful & fine-grained.
As I understand you would like to model part of IC development process. However this "part" is part of a whole. And it is our collective experience: when someone tries to stick to the part "the rest of the whole" feeds in mostly junk data rendering it ineffective. On the other hand if you would like to evolve the "part" gradually into a whole, the big picture has to be in place from the very beginning, otherwise pretty soon it will fall apart.
Lastly an interesting realization: especially in R&D environment, when you try to document a process people usually tell you how the process "should" be done rather than how it is being done. So once the process is in place with some sort of rigidity you run into all sorts of interesting people issues.....
We believe,at my present company, that a "controlled" free form environment is prerequisite to successful modeling of IC development life cycle. It is an environment which models the "natural" LC process, rather than imposing one. However the free form part of the environment let the LC gradually "evolve" to be better & better with each iteration. It records and simulates the detailed activities of a development LC.
Enterprises are mostly convinced about the benefits of web 2.0 technologies but grappling with difficult adoption issues. In our case we show that without web 2.0 getting a "handle" on IC development process is not simply possible.
We will talk more...
Regards,
Faisal
Paul O
Software Consultant, People and Process Engineer, Lean, Agile and RUP at Capgemini
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I work in Software rather than semiconductors, but I can point you in a few useful directions. A good book to start with is "Lean Software Development: an Agile Toolkit" by Mary & Tom Poppendieck. It lists 22 'thinking' tools for working with product development process.
For modelling our Software development process I favour tools based on the "Software Process Engineering Metamodel" (SPEM) that allows us to describe processes very flexibly so that the practitioners can adapt to the immediate needs readily as they go.
I have come across process flow modelling tools that can 'animate' the process, though haven't used them myself.
In general, the team always learns useful things by participating on modelling their process, and there are always unexpected findings. I commonly find that everyone believes that everything they do adds value, so relating back to the value the customer says they want can be a real eye-opener to the team.
My key thinking tool for development process - from a process engineer's point of view - is that the only things that add value are discoveries and decisions. That makes an awful lot of potential waste visible. My pithy maxim - "Cut overheads not corners" :-)
Hope this helps
Modelling the IC design process is part of my work and in the past years we investigated several ways to simulate the process and get quantitative feedback to make grounded decision. Part of this work has even been funded by the german government (the project has been called 'Produktiv+').
1) We looked at process simulators and project management tools (like then one from InterWeave) as well as the Numetrics offering but since our requirements are very special we came up with a home-grown solution. Different from what Numetrics does (statistical analysis of data and inter-/extrapolation for similar projects) we are focusing on developing heuristic models to get a holonic system where you can dive into the detailed design & verification steps and analyze their influence on the overall process.
2) Yes, we found a value in this effort (as this triggered the development of of a product/service offering)
3) No unexpected but underestimated: to get good results out of such simulations you will need a good amount of crisp data about your design processes and environment. And to get this is not an easy task.
Eyck J also suggests this expert on this topic:
More Answers (5)
Steve D
Bringing actionable intelligence to AEM members
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I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you refer to modeling the product development process.
Regardless, when I ran the early stages of new product development in my last job, I build an internal website for tracking ideas, communication, ranking & portfolio management. It worked fairly well, and was in use longer than expected for a beta (alpha, really) system. I built it using Drupal.
Links:
Nancy H
Client Relationship Lead at ADi
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I'm not sure if this is the kind of ansewr we are looking for, but we have worked on projects where we used various kinds of product development and research data to create simulations and visualizations of product that don't exist yet for the purpose of helping manufacturers hone in of the features, benefits and user interface design and form factor design that potential customers cared about the most.
Mark R
Business Strategist
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Hi Jeff,
This could help you - we model all our process to ensure that we optimize our efforts in alignment with achieving business goals. We use Knowledge Genes because it maps WHAT needs to be achieved, HOW this is done and WHY it's important - in a way that's verifyable and understandable by everyone.
It's a Web based solution so you can start right away. To get started, simply Register for free, then click 'Create a new Knowledge Gene' from your Profile page.
HTH
Mark
Links:
If you are trying to steamline the product development process have you considered using value stream mapping?
Faisal,
what you write is very interesting since I am similarly interested to model parts of the IC development process in detail.
I am already gathering related 'process' information but want to model it in a process model which could be simulated as well primarily to identify bottlenecks and to assess improvement opportunities in a quantitative fashion.
You did similar things already (functional validation). Why did you chose to implement this in C++? Where you not able to map this to existing process models/ process simulators?
Your LinkedIn profile seems to suggest that you are working in a company which addresses this modeling/ simulation/ reporting space?
Thomas
PS: Numetrics is just a coarse grain overview tool to compare one project to another but not able to analyze design processes in detail.
Clarification added 27 days ago:
Hello Faisal,
thank you for your additional information.
I agree with your view on the overall process, this is certainly right and correct.
From my perspective of an internal CAD group I need to focus on the aspects of the product development process from system level design down to the interface to the mask shop.
The objective is to realize productivity improvements in a sustainable fashion. Therefore the idea is to capture the process design step by design step, capturing information about runtimes (cpu time), iterations (how many and why), etc.
Combined in to a process flow chart e.g. in Visio and annotated with the gathered data one could simulate this process and analyze what-if scenarios for potential improvements on the overall process.
Has anyone experience in this particular area?
Thanks,
Thomas
