Search Results

Product development process (PDP) is a strategic element for organization's success, linking the market to the company. In spite of this, manufacturing can be considered as PDP's first customer, with requirements and constraints in order to maximize new product fabrication efficiency. In a wide range of manufacturing elements, production systems availability is critical for operation performance. To this end, companies have invested resources on Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) implementation, in which its main purpose consists in policies, practices and activities to improve efficiency through manufacturing system life cycle management approach. However, some TPM concepts have not been investigated accurately yet, one of them is to explore how to integrate TPM into PDP through a structured method.

The Brazilian automotive industry has faced major transformations in the last few years. Companies have adopted new strategies to manage the product development process in order to reduce project lead-time and increase the number of launches. This paper aims to present the findings of an exploratory study of the adoption of the co-design strategy in the power train product development of a Brazilian automaker. The principal evidences were: supplier involvement reduced the time taken for the product's development, change of roles in the automaker/supplier relationship and the lack of clear methods to select suppliers to become product development partners.

This paper presents the results of a survey on the practices, problems, performance and trends in the product development process (PDP) management of the Brazilian autoparts industry. Last decade, this industry underwent a broad process of restructuring following the deregulation of Brazilian economy. In general, there is: a wide dissemination of PDP reference models, but they are partly implemented; application of methods and tools to problem solving, but they are poor integrated; use of development teams to carried out the tasks; integration with automakers; and, there is a lack of PDP performance measurement.

The aim of this work is to characterize the strategy on the development of products in the Brazilian automobile industry, using for this end, an analysis of 17 models launched in the last fifteen years by the four main automobile assemblers. Considering aspects such as market prospects and the international insertion of the Brazilian automobile industry, the characterization of the respective strategies was related to the relationship between the Brazilian assemblers and their headquarters. In order to characterize the development strategy of products, principal parts of the model (body, chassi and motorization) are related to the place (headquarters or filial) where the development process has been carried out, through four types of projects (new design, rapid design transfer - simultaneous, sequential design transfer and design modification).

The scope of this work is to indicate critical organization and management features present in the development of new high performance products. A theoretical approach will be presented followed by a case study which will allow illustration of some of these features. The development of new models is fundamental for the competitiveness of industries. The importance of this work for the design topics is to point out the critical features which should be adequately managed to structurize and integrated organization with superior performance in the development of new products.