As the growth of the global automobile industry is getting slow, the electric vehicle market is expanding due to fuel economy regulations. In addition, the development of products with autonomous driving technology by digital transformation is rapidly progressing. Thus, the quick adaption to the development change is required by car makers and automotive parts.
The purpose of this study is to provide the priority of the front-loading core activities on the design stage of the automotive parts development process, in order to efficiently & effectively respond to the demands of the car maker(customer). By prioritization, the development direction is given in order to improve design completeness within a limited design period. “Front-loading” is defined as a strategy in order to improve development performance by finding out and solving design problems on the earlier phases of a product development process. Two approaches of the front-loading are project-to-project knowledge transfer and rapid problem solving. For the study, a survey was conducted on the R&D department in the automobile parts company and analyzed by AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) method.
First, the priority selection process for “Improvements to exiting products” consists of six core activities of front-loading on the parts design stage, which are required by the car makers. Second, “New-to-world products” systematically derive new core activities and select priorities of them. Derivation of core activities defines the design process of the new product development process as a technology system, and compares and analyzes the activities through literature on the APQP(Advanced Products Quality Planning), GE-NPI(General Electric-New Product Introduction), and DFSS(Design for Six Sigma) as new product development processes, and then the candidates for front-loading activities on the design stage are derived. Next, after the evaluation criteria were presented in terms of the TRIZ(theory of solving inventive problem) technology system, According to the criteria, six core activities from front-loading activities on the design stages are derived through Pugh Matrix. The priority of the core activities of the front-loading was selected through AHP.
As a result of the study, the following are the six priority elements of the front-loading core activity. “Improvements to exiting products” have the order of priority as “Problems of past project”, “Drawing Review”, “CAE(Computer Aided Engineering)”, “FMEA(Failure Mode and Effects Analysis)” & “SR(Sourcing of Requirements)”. On the other hand, “New-to-world products” have the order of priority as “CAE”, “Drawing Review”, “FMEA”, “TRIZ”, “DFM(Design for Manufacturing)/ Problems of past project” & “VOC (Voice of Customer)”. Finally, the findings are expected to provide a valuable guideline for improving design completeness to “product design researchers”.