This paper discusses views on decision support in product development to identify factors of relevance when designing computer-based decision sup- port for total offers. Providing services in form of physical artefacts of- fered as ‘functions per unit’ is at the heart of total offers. Total offers gain access to possibilities to ‘design in’ value added characteristics into the physical artefact, e.g., maintenance, monitoring, training, remanufacture. Contemporary computer tools seem to be insufficient to support a GO/NO GO decision for total offers. Relevant factors to take into consideration are to support learning and provide the decision makers with insights in a number of plausible ‘what-if’ scenarios to improve the solution space.

In aeronautics industry today, companies collaborate closely in virtual enterprises to develop products and solutions that are more integrated and more complex, and that aims to target larger responsibilities regarding the product life-cycle. On top of this, lead-time and development costs needs to be reduced.<br/>The 7 Day Proposal (7DP) is the conceptual name of a framework wherein a customized proposal is produced by a virtual enterprise consortium within seven days from a received request for proposal. This is substantially shorter than what is current practice today and implies that new methods, tools and ways of working are needed. Today, in offer processes, time is lost because of insufficient, or immature, available information and knowledge at gate reviews when decisions are due, causing time consuming iterations. <br/>The Gated Maturity Assessment (GMA) concept is intended to help reduce these costly iterations by targeting the ambiguity at these gate reviews in order to reduce the uncertainty in decision base. <br/>Other frameworks using maturity include Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) and the Capability Maturity Model (CMM). TRL is an artefact-focused framework developed by NASA to assess space technology maturity. CMM is a process-focused framework for assessing organisations' software development process capability (maturity). <br/>The GMA is a concept for assessing the maturity of the knowledge that goes into a gate review (i.e. a decision document). The GMA is intended to support decision makers by assuring confidence in these decision points and thereby reducing the number of iterations, hereby reducing lead-time and increases the quality of the process.<br/>This paper reports on the development of the GMA concept from the 7DP use case, and also the development of a support tool intended for use in the 7DP process. <br/>Essentially, the 7DP process is a stage-gate process like many corporate product development processes with a number of decision gates. Therefore there is a future wish to move towards an engineering design context with this concept. <br/>The work is part of the 70 million € European project VIVACE where GMA is part of a Knowledge Enabled Engineering solution to the 7DP use case.

In stage-gate processes decisions are made based on the knowledge and information developed during the preceding phase. The purpose of this study is to explore the state-of-practice in industry regarding the assessment of knowledge and information at gates. The result indicates that gate reviews relate mainly to assessments of technical performance and function. Relatively little attention is given to assess the quality of the knowledge base, making it difficult to identify outdated, irrelevant and non-applicable information and knowledge. Further, tacit knowledge plays an important role in the decision-making process, as reviewers ask for the design rationale and further evidence of what has been done and why. However, evaluating such knowledge is currently a poorly understood aspect of gate reviews. It is concluded that even though the specific focus of such meetings is not on the evaluation of knowledge and information, the opportunity to work towards a better support of such activities is promising, especially since the respondents perceive the benefits that come from an increased attention to assessments of both the explicit and tacit knowledge base used in gate reviews.

This paper investigates decision making in the stage-gate process used by an aerospace manufacturer. More specifically, it focuses on the way decision makers deal with uncertainties and ambiguities when making decisions. The stage-gate model was found to be a discussion trigger - a boundary negotiating artefact - through which stakeholders bring issues to the table, reflect on uncertainties, and decide in what areas more knowledge is needed. Managers should be aware that the knowledge base might not always be perfect and should make use of the sensemaking capabilities of the stage-gate model and the gate meeting to mitigate and improve the knowledge base. This paper elaborates on formalized knowledge-based criteria so as to support this evaluation of the knowledge base.

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Streamlining new product development forces companies to make decisions on preliminary information. This paper considers this challenge within the context of project management in the aerospace sector, and in particular the development of product-service systems.  The concept of knowledge maturity is explored as a means to provide practical decision support, which increases decision makers' awareness of the knowledge base and supports cross-boundary discussions on the perceived maturity of available knowledge, thereby identifying and mitigating limitations. Requirements are elicited from previous research on knowledge maturity in the aerospace industry and a knowledge maturity model is developed through five industry-based workshops.