Abstract
While firms need to reform their product development process in response to the shortening product life cycle, digital manufacturing tools are expected to be powerful driver for achieving the purpose through achieving up-front engineering. However, the management literature reports negative effect of CAE utilization to product development period despite its positive impact on product quality. We relate CAE utilization to product development phases and find CAE effect on product development performance is contingent on development stage where it is exploited due to the inherent incompleteness of CAE. We also argue the possibility that organizational learning of CAE utilization at later stage such as prototyping may sometimes become obstacles to achieving up-front engineering since the required capability for CAE at earlier stage is different from that at the later stage.
