AW Automotive Product Development Process Management Improvement Program Discussion

AW company is a professional subcontract manufacturer of plastic molding components design and production. It is a big challenge for management team of AW to maintain marketing competition and obtain new order in this increasingly fierce competition market, and satisfy the end manufacturer for shortening product design and development leadtime, more and more strict quality requirement and low cost request. This thesis is entering into how to enhance the core competitiveness of AW company through improving new product’s project development procedure efficiency.This thesis enters into andraws out the guiding ideology and theoretical basis from stage-gate and concurrent engineering theory, methods of modern engineering theory such as quality function deployment, failure mode and effects analysis and project cost budget at first. Followed by this thesis research and analyses AW’s current new product development process and the present situation not to adapt the current automotive product supply competition, not well to satisfy the customer requirement on new product development leadtime and quality control. Then setting new product project development leadtime,quality and cost as three key project indicator of process management and improvement. And formulating new product development process management model improvement proposal including traditional function management should be changed to process oriented in new product development management mechanism, serial engineering progress management should be changed to concurrent engineering progress management, post control of Research&Development should be changed to pre control. At the same time, project manager responsibility management system is a good measures to control and ensure realizing new product development targets which are including shortening leadtime, improving quality and reducing development and production cost. This thesis verifys the actual application effect of improved process throung applying on D2XX project in AW company, and recommending further improvement proposal according to the problems found in application process.