Design Chain Collaboration– A Strategic View

Design chain collaboration involves the process to integrate suppliers’ design expertise in the product design stage. With the increasing of product information contents and the extending of design authority distribution, the collaboration process has become more and more complex. Lots of studies have been focused on developing applications such as application integration software or project management applications in order to manage the complexity. However, as the complexity of design chain collaboration keeps growing, these applications might meet their limitation soon. Instead of trying to manage the complexity, this paper focuses on discussing strategic approaches that can be used to reduce design chain collaboration complexity. The sources that keep the complexity grow are first examined, and strategic approaches to reduce design chain collaboration complexity is discussed in this paper.