Decision Sciences Journal
Volume 30, Number 1
Winter 1999
Limits to Concurrency
Geert M. Hoedemaker
INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France, email: hoedemaker@pi.net
Joseph D. Blackburn
Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, Nashville,
TN 37203, email: joe.blackburn@owen.vanderbilt.edu
Luk N. Van Wassenhove
INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France, email: wassenhove@insead.fr
Abstract. In the global race to bring new products
to market, many firms have adopted concurrent engineering as
a technique to shrink development lead time. Due to the many
concurrent engineering success stories in the business and engineering
literature, a common misconception has grown that more concurrency
is always better. The major contribution of this paper is a rigorous
demonstration that limits to concurrency exist even in the simplified
situation in which concurrency is modeled as the number of design
modules to be executed in parallel. As complexities such as communication
linkages between modules are layered onto our basic model, we
show that the expected project completion time is minimized at
a finite number of modules, a number that decreases with increasing
problem complexity. In general, the more complex the project,
the stricter the limits to concurrency. This strongly suggests
that project managers should be cognizant of the potentially
adverse effects of pushing concurrency too far.
Subject Areas: Concurrent Engineering, New Product
Introduction, Probability Models, and Product Design and Development. |