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ABSTRACT
Outsourcing more of the design and production than before, manufacturers increasingly take on the role of systems integrators and collaborate with “design chain” partners to bring a new product to market. The purpose of this paper is to provide a preliminary study that applies the concept of activity overlapping to accelerate design chain activities in order to improve the time to market. An activity overlapping model adapted from the literature is used to determine the optimal overlapping time and the number of information exchanges required to minimize the development lead-time between two dependent activities. Two parametric functions are proposed to model information evolution and iteration sensitivity for upstream and downstream activities. The impacts of activity overlapping on development lead-time can be thoroughly analyzed for different combinations of evolutions and sensitivities. Several strategies for managing design chain to improve the time to market are also discussed.