Supply Chain Integration in Complex Product Development: A Multi-Case Study

[EN] An important trend in New Product Development (NPD) projects is the involvement of suppliers in them, in order to obtain great competitive advantage, improve quality and reduce the cost of new products and time. This involvement may range from simple consultation with suppliers on design ideas to making suppliers fully responsible for the design of components or systems they will supply. Moreover, suppliers can be involved at different stages of the new product development process. Although extensive research has been carried out on supplier integration in NPD (Monczka, Ragatz, Handfield Clark, Kim B., 1989; McGinnis, 1998 among others), all of it is focused on success supplier integration factors and the requirements of this relationship. This paper focuses on several important questions regarding supplier involvement in new product development that remain unanswered, like when it is better to involve the suppliers and how. The main findings of this Master’s Thesis are that there is not a rule that defines where or how suppliers have to be involved, it depends on the product features, what the customer company is looking for and the supplier expertise, among others. The contribution of this Master’s Thesis is a new model developed which considers the most important variables in the customer-supplier relationship in a supplier involvement in NPD, they are: the cost of design changes, the supplier responsibility and the supplier level of integration in the five possible phases that Handfield (1999) defined