A methodologv to modularize the product development porcess based on customer needs

Managing the product development process constitutes a major challenge faced by all enterprise attempting to develop products that can respond to the ever changing customer needs. This paper presents a methodology -built on die concepts of Design for Modularity that could be used to modularize the product development process by identifying a set of product modules based on functions dictated by customer requirements. Each module corresponds to a subset of customer functions. The modules are then assigned to different design team resulting in a reduction of the complexity of the design problem solved by each team, and better management of the overall development effort.