Mega Trends of Automotive Industry and Evolution of Reliability Engineering 2004-01-1539

With more than one hundred years of history, the auto industry has entered a new business environment. Several mega trends will continuously sharpen auto industry in the future. These mega trends can be identified as over-capacity in developed markets, rising of emerging markets, globalization, technology advances, regulation and environmental consideration, and market fragmentation and product proliferation.

To cope with these new business challenges, OEMs and their suppliers are striving to build up scale by consolidation and globalization, accelerating their pace to launch new products, utilizing platform and modularity strategy. They also emphasize their supply network management, develop technology off-line, and apply lean engineering and production.

In this paper, a top-down approach is used to identify the evolution of reliability engineering in auto industry. To support auto industry business strategy, reliability engineering will move from Tool-Based, to Process-Oriented, and then to Principle-Centered. The focus of reliability engineering will also shift from reliability demonstration (measuring reliability) to reliability development (making reliability). Reliability engineering will evolve from verification driven, to requirements driven, then to customer driven, and finally to value driven. Accompanying this paradigm shift, more and more efforts will be invested in the earlier stages of product development when the decision-making has most impact on product reliability. In parallel, reliability engineering will more and more emphasize on system and multi-disciplinary (mechanical, hydraulic, electric and electronic, software and etc.) integration, life cycle ownership cost, and supply network management.