Development Optimization with System Bundled Engineering in Body Exterior Lighting at an Automobile Manufacturer 2018-01-1035

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster “horses”. Henry Ford [5].

The automotive industry is in an environment where things are constantly moving and so Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have to move. Continuous technological progression is a key factor for the industry to be economically successful, to shape the future and with that to achieve maximum profit and benefits for the enterprise from the social transformation. Today the automotive industry uses all kind of innovation to create advanced new vehicles and solve tomorrow’s overall transportation challenges. In particular, exterior lighting has become a key contributor of the vehicle’s first impression and appearance. The features and technologies that provide as much light as possible on the road to improve the driver’s visibility at night have become more relevant and even safety standard. Additionally, recent technology innovations enable exterior lighting to be a personalized user experience as well as an identification and communication tool with the whole environment to leverage car-to-x (C2X).

Exterior lighting is known as a commodity with a high speed of innovation and a strong technology penetration. A plethora of new exterior lighting features, enabled with new technologies and light sources, has entered the market within the last decade. This leads to almost infinite feature and technology combination possibilities within the product development across vehicles and global markets. Considering the feature and technology portfolio, each more than 20 elements, the faculty calculation result is greater than one Million reflecting the different feature and technology combination possibilities on headlamps and rear lamps. With the increasing speed of the technology development and customer feature desire as well as a shorter time to market, the key challenge of today is in the parallel development of complex systems: to manage and control the whole system development with all the interfaces between standardized modules and unique components, from the OEM and from other supply base sources.

The objective of this paper is to create a common engineering understanding of the development approach Bundled Engineering for operating product development competitively in exterior lighting. In addition to that, the paper establishes a foundation to further highlight and discuss the potential of this development approach according to product complexity cost reduction and optimization of engineering effort.