Design for complexity: a global perspective through industrial enterprises analyst and designer

Industrial enterprises analysts and/or designers should be aware of the impact of complexity in their organisations, although they are often defined as being complex. Nowadays, the researchers focused their attention on design for manufacturing, design for assembly, design for cost or design for quality, design for X, etc. they did not mention design for complexity as an important issue especially during the existing global financial crisis. Design for complexity is a systemic approach that simultaneously considers optimising design objectives (i.e. minimise complexity level), variables (parameters) and constraints. This paper includes how to present the concepts of complexity to guide industrial enterprises analysts and designers with the most effective issues and perspective strategies for analysing, planning and eliminating complexity to satisfy design of industrial enterprises. Based on these aspects, the complexity levels will be analysed and evaluated through identifying four major issues: design for vision complexity, design for system structure, design for operating complexity and design for evaluating complexity. The ultimate goal of this paper is to provide the industrial enterprises designers with such complexity information. This analysis shows that the design for complexity is a huge task and should be optimised and taken into considerations when designing an industrial enterprise.