Application And Practice Of Project Management Based On Product Life Cycle In Automotive Electronics Industry

The development and manufacture of automotive electronics products and the project management is becoming more and more complicated. Applying a suitable project management method and architecture will make a key role to the success of the automotive electronics project. Meanwhile, in order to lower the cost, shorten the time to market, increase the product quality, encourage technical innovation and increase the value of products, so that the continuously changing requirement of customer and the sustainable development of society can be met and the competitiveness of the company can be maintained, thus, applying the project management based on product life cycle gradually becomes the trend of project management in automotive electronics industry. However, the automotive electronic industry in the Chinese market is far from mature, problems also exist when applying the project management based on the product life cycle, such as: the project manager only cares about the project progress but ignores the product life cycle; the project manager is not able to apply the basic elements of the project management into the management of the product life cycle; the management of the enterprise is not able to make use of the characters of the product life cycle to steer the overall plan of the projects, etc. With respect to these problems, this dissertation makes research on the product life cycle model and application of automotive electronic industry, focusing on:Analyze and conclude the understandings of product life cycle in the articles and researches, also its application in the automotive industry. Build the model of project management based on product life cycle in automotive electronics industry, including: define the product life cycle in this specific industry, define project organization chart, project member responsibility, milestone, deliveries, project reviews, process and contents related to the elements of project management. Take the project management of the Basic Functional Controller platform and application projects in Continental Automotive Corporation as a example to analyze and conclude the application of the project management based on product life cycle in automotive electronics industry. The result shows that this model has the advantage of saving the human resource and invest of the company, defining clear project timing plan, milestones, strict process and rules, increasing the product quality, lowering the project risk, and also makes it easier for the company to allocate its resources.