Balancing the ‘Know-how’ and ‘Know-why’ of Make-to-Order (MTO) Product Development

This paper develops an application of
knowledge transfer and process assessment
within the realms of MTO product development. Prior studies in new product development (NPD) have delivered various tools and techniques in a generic context. A more realistic scenario, however, is to consider the needs of MTO organisations, one of the main problems associated with such organisations which what are sometimes essentially “one-off” projects. By extending the integrated definition for function modelling (IDEF0)-based modelling approach the paper demonstrates how to calculate the ‘process quality’ of the activity output and the robustness of the ‘activity’ within context of MTO. Two longitudinal case studies provided an empirical method of inquiry enabling the researcher to investigate the knowledge transfer within ‘live’ cases using multiple resources of evidence. The results highlight that this is a valuable tool for assessing ‘robustness’ and a mechanism for organisation learning in order to support future MTO projects.