An application of Knowledge Management in Design Structure Matrix for a process improvement phase

Design Structure Matrix (DSM) is a well-established engineering systems tool that allows designing, developing and managing complex engineered systems. However, the question of how a DSM is built and what are the relevant phases of this process in order to effectively capture the knowledge from the industry experts, is a subject that hasn't deserved much attention in the literature. Building a DSM is a challenging task because it requires finding people knowledgeable about each activity of the process and inquiring their expert judgment about the probable interactions between the activities. This paper attempts to address this problem by applying basic knowledge management techniques to the newly developed DSM based tool called Non Conformity Matrix (NCM). Multiple NCMs are built based on the knowledge of documented information, interviewing experts of an industry and interviewing system engineers. A comparison among the NCMs shows that the systems level information exists mostly in peoples' heads.