Comparative Research On Product Development Process Of Mainstream Automotive Enterprises

With the steady development of the automotive industry,the auto industry is witnessing an increasingly fierce competition and diversified development trends,and customer demand is also experiencing a rapid change.Automotive technology develops in an extremely fast pace so that automotive products updates in a gradually more and more rapid speed,leading to shorter lifecycles of auto products.Meanwhile,the new round of science and technology revolution has also brought the auto industry under the impact of new technologies,new thoughts and new patterns like the Internet and big data.Faced with such rigorous competition in the auto industry,automotive enterprises can only find a place in the market when they keep on bringing new types of auto products to the market.A full set of scientific and applicable automotive product development process is an effective support for successful automotive product development projects and the stronger competitive ability of the enterprises.In this paper,we first make a comparative analysis of the auto product development process of the international mainstream auto enterprises,on the basis of which we establish an effective model to analyze how to evaluate the level of the auto product development process.Then we delve deeply into the current situation of the development process of China's independent brand of automotive enterprises.Last,some suggestions are given to help improve the situation.Firstly,this paper defines the eight factors that can influence the auto product development process.They are product planning,platform development,development time management,development cost management,supplier management,development quality management,test verification and organization of research and development.It establishes an evaluation model of the auto product development process and then by using Analytic Hierarchy Process(AHP)it determines the weight of the index system of the evaluation model.Secondly,this paper makes a comparative study of the auto product development process of the international mainstream automotive enterprises represented by Volkswagen of Germany,General Motors of America and Toyota of Japan and then uses the evaluation model to make a comprehensive evaluation about the development process level of the three mainstream auto enterprises above respectively.Through the study,we find that in terms of the comprehensive level of the product development process Toyota ranks the first,Volkswagen the second and General Motors the last.Toyota,which lags behind Volkswagen only on platform development,gets ahead of both Volkswagen and General Motors in terms of all the other seven indicators held by auto enterprises as what can define the level of the auto product development process.This paper also goes into details about the development processes of Volkswagen,General Motors and Toyota.And on this basis,we summarize the universality of the development process hoping it can exert some guiding values for China's independent brand of auto enterprises to improve and perfect their auto product development system.What's more,we also apply the Multilevel Fuzzy Absolute Evaluation Method to evaluate and analyze the current situation of the auto product development process of independent brand of auto enterprises.The results show that the comprehensive level for product development process of independent brand of automotive enterprises lag behind the leading international auto enterprises such as Volkswagen,General Motors and Toyota,etc.On development time management and development cost management,they behave quite well,getting very close to the leading international level.However,in terms of product planning,supplier management,test verification and organization of research and development,they all fall behind the leading international level.And in terms of their platform development and development quality management,they fall even far behind,with their platform development being the weakest.On the basis of these deep analyses,we come up with some suggestions for the improvement of the auto product development process of China's independent brand of auto enterprises.In the end,by making use of the advanced technologies of development and thoughts in the Internet age and also the idea of user-participation,we provide some innovative thoughts about the auto products development process.