Time-cost trade-offs in overlapped product development

Increasingly shorter product life cycles impel firms to design, develop, and market more products in less time than ever before. Overlapping of design and development stages is commonly regarded as the most promising strategy to reduce product development times. However, overlapping typically requires additional resources and can be costly. Our research addresses the trade-off between product development time and costs and introduces an algorithm to determine an appropriate overlapping strategy under different scenarios. The methodology developed was successfully employed at Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International.