Standardized cross-functional communication as a robust design tool - Mitigating variation, saving costs and reducing the New Product Development Process’ lead time by optimizing the information flow.

The thesis will analyse how data should be collected, organized and visualized in order to facilitate decision making at different levels of a welding organization with the objective to lower risk of product failures. The purpose of the thesis project is to explore how the decision support system should be designed in order to give the best information to the different departments involved in the product development process. The attention will be on what metrics should be monitored and on how the related data should be visualized for the specific stakeholders in the process based on what decisions they have to take. The driving principle is robust engineering: how should the system be operated in order to mitigate any incoming variation and to keep a top performance level.