Designing complex products, such as jet engines, cars or certain types of software, necessitates the coordination of activities of many participants during the design process. Communication is seen as the vehicle by which this coordination could be achieved. Communication itself is influenced by many different factors that are connected. This study presents an exploration of correlations between these factors based on statistical analyses of empirical data. The research uses data collected via the `Communication Grid Method', (CGM) a structured maturity grid method to assess the perception of communication within and across team-interfaces. Five empirical studies in the aerospace, automotive, and IT industries where concurrent engineering is practiced are used. The results offer insights for researching and managing communication across inter-departmental interfaces. It has been shown in particular, how directly and indirectly linked factors influencing communication in product development form a network of correlations. Mutual trust and collaboration exhibit thematic centrality.

This paper presents a method that uses engineering change forecast to identify and prioritise product components for modularisation. The method uses a matrix-based technique to map change requirements to affected product components and later converts the said matrix into a component dependency matrix referred to in this work as the Engineering Change Forecast (ECF) matrix. The risk of change for each component is subsequently computed based on the ECF matrix to prioritise components for modularisation. The method was applied to support modularisation efforts pertaining to the design of a truck at a multinational engineering firm based in Germany. Six hundred and forty-three change requirements were considered in this work. As a comparison study, an analysis was made at the component level and repeated at the sub-component level. It was found that out of the top ten sub-components that were ranked with high modularisation priority, nine are sub-components of the top three components prioritised for modularisation when the analysis was done at the component level. This suggests that the method can produce consistent results over different levels of modelling granularity.

The need for integration of computer-aided design and computer-aided engineering environments stems from the business priority to reduce product cycle times. It is exacerbated by the coexistence of two different paradigms: a topological one in embodiment design and a functional one in simulation. This dualism places increasing demands on human communication between design and simulation engineers. This paper claims that reflecting communication is a key factor for successful collaboration. Reflection is used in both senses of the Latin word ‘reflectare’: to trigger active thinking about and consideration of communication, as well as to mirror perceptions of a given situation by people collaborating. The paper reports on the development and application of a maturity-grid approach to diagnose the current and desired states of communication between design engineers and simulation engineers in the car body development of a German automotive manufacturer. Results include three themes: one, the importance of understanding of the collaborators’ information needs; two, the importance of orientation, e.g., indicated by the engineers’ overview of sequence of tasks in the design process; and three, the importance of reflection.