Bringing together knowledge about the product life cycle to improve inter-firm collaboration capabilities

The emerging division of labour regarding new product development tasks creates new challenges for Tier 1 Suppliers. They face the need to enable and control increasingly outsourced and geographically dispersed product development activities. Analysis of the way suppliers' teams handle the impacts of Engineering Change Requests shows that their capacity to successfully manage the extended enterprise depends on suppliers' capabilities to collectively represent their functional interdependences while preserving their own requirements for each phase of the product life cycle. Challenges posed by the acceleration of the pace of innovation demonstrate that current product life cycle definition devices are not adapted to managing stretched – and potentially conflicting – situated judgements concerning the conformity of complex product requirements. There are still limiting obstacles in bringing together knowledge about the product definition, tasks dependencies and load and lead time estimates – and, ultimately, consistently describing a manufacturable product life cycle.