Appliancesa New Product Development: Exploring the Influence of Fuzzy Front End Phase on Time to Market
The purpose of this study was to identify the main uncertainties involved in the fuzzy front end phase of a new product development and to determine the weight of factors that define the time to market a product. The focus of this study has emerged from the need to explain the complexity of the fuzzy front end of a project and to understand and establish a treatment for the variables involved. Although literature covers the existence of difficulties in managing the fuzzy front end of projects, there is no reference to the identification of those variables and to the determination of their influence on the time to market. The interest in the fuzzy front end is justified due to the doubts that occur at that point of the development process of a new product. The fuzzy front end mentioned by some authors covers project management difficulties that occur at the very beginning of a project due to the lack of more precise data and to the possibility that the project team may face unknown situations and tasks. This paper proposes the use of systemic modeling tools in the fuzzy front end of a new product and the use of linear regression and variance analysis to determine the time to market. A study to be used as the database has been carried out with a home appliance company.
