Enhancing Distributed Product Development Agility with Enterprise Systems

Organizations face severe challenges for achieving the desired agility and effectiveness in timely supplying products and services to global markets. Also, firms are now increasingly outsourcing and distributing manufacture of products for economic reasons. Many companies have adopted enterprise systems (ESs) technology to enhance their core competencies and processes for improving new product development and supply to the marketplace. This paper discusses how implementation of an ES and knowledge-based processes in critical functional areas, enhances product development agility in a distributed environment. A case study is conducted in a manufacturing firm to evaluate the dispersed business practices which are complemented with knowledge processes through the use of ESs to support different phases of product development. Implications of strategies such as concurrent engineering, knowledge management, and virtual integration through use of ESs to become agile are explained.