An application of Project Management techniques for the estimation of processing times in industrial projects with a high degree of innovation

During the last few years, both industrial and academic people have questioned the usefulness of Project Management (PM) tools in manufacturing field. Despite several applications arising from PM now known like time management, risk management, budgeting, scheduling and others, these tools appear to be barely used where industrial projects are characterized by a high degree of innovation. Throughout history the great uncertainty about innovative projects duration obliged project managers to overestimate processing time as precautionary behaviour. This conduct often precludes new project opportunities for companies, decreasing their competitiveness. To overcome this limit, this work wants to develop a hybrid methodology to estimate as accurately as possible individual durations of activities belonging to a complex process. That kind of intervention lead to minimize possible costs for wrong estimations and maximize enterprises competitiveness. For this purpose, the authors combine some statistical tools used in Project management as Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), Critical Path Method (CPM) and the parametric estimation with physical models used in manufacturing field, validating the obtained results in a real manufacturing case study. Through this research, authors put in evidence the possibility to adopt these techniques to well-known procedures employed to make products never realized before, for which no previous accurate data are available so far. This study highlights how it would be possible to reduce the effect of precautionary behaviors, supporting companies to accept a higher number of projects to be developed in a time range.