Concurrent engineering processes are, in reality, a network of interlinked elements belonging to different domains such as process steps, information objects, organizational units, IT-ressources, milestones, durations, and decisions. When trying to understand such a complex system, e.g. in business process reengineering projects, common approaches often regard only a single domain and therefore neglect other interdependencies that often turn out to be just as crucial. Using examples from a current project with a major German automotive manufacturer, an approach using design structure matrices as well as domain mapping matrices (combining them to obtain the Multiple Design Structure Matrix, MDSM) is shown to represent the existing multitude of process elements in a common model. The multiple domains can then be reduced to a single-domain view, which allows further examination of implicit process-structures (e.g. misalignment between implicit and real organizational structures). We give several examples for possible types of misalignment by comparing the as-is situation with the obtained results from MDSM analysis. As an outlook, we propose different techniques for further analysis using methods adapted from the theroy of complex networks.     «

Concurrent engineering processes are, in reality, a network of interlinked elements belonging to different domains such as process steps, information objects, organizational units, IT-ressources, milestones, durations, and decisions. When trying to understand such a complex system, e.g. in business process reengineering projects, common approaches often regard only a single domain and therefore neglect other interdependencies that often turn out to be just as crucial. Using examples from a curre...     »