As the lifecycle of a product gets shorter, the timely introduction of new products
becomes an invaluable asset to most manufacturing firms. It is needless to say that
the competitive edge is given to a firm with the better knowledge on how to estimate
the product development (PD) process because reducing the product development time
is a critical issue for manufacturing firms. However, it is difficult to estimate
the performance of the PD process because of its complexity. So far, in spite of its
strategic importance, only a few studies have been done. To overcome this
limitation, in this study, the authors provide a heuristic algorithm that can
estimate the lead time of a complex PD process by series–parallel network
transformation and network reduction methods with estimates of the makespans of
branch–merge types. To show the usefulness of this method, computational
experiments have been carried out.
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