Search Results

A decade and a half after its conception, Open Innovation (OI) is still a growing topic in the academic community. The automotive industry, however, is no stranger to the subject and activities that are now known as OI practices have been an integral part to automotive new product development activities for decades. The purpose of the present study is to analyze how open innovation occurs in the automotive industry and to compare exploratory results between Brazil's and France's automaker industries. The study introduces a brief literature review concerning the topics of Product Development Process (PDP) and OI, paving the path towards the analyzed constructs. The chosen research approach was that of a survey, with 57 responses from Brazilian automakers and 15 from French.

The competition among automotive industries increases each year worldwide. Among their diverse needs, what can be highlighted are: market expansion, model diversification, competitive prices, customer-recognized quality, new products release in shorter time periods, among others. The occurrence of flaws that might compromise the health or safety of the product’s user is admittedly one of the largest issues for any manufacturer, especially if these flaws are identified after its commercialization (recall). In this work, a study on recall in the automotive industry in the Brazilian market will be presented, comprising the years of 2013 and 2014. Reasons and causes of recall are addressed, based on the sample of the aforementioned research, with special emphasis on flaws derived from the production process. The conclusion at the end of the work is that the final assembly in the automotive manufacturing process is what requires more attention from engineering area.

The Digital Factory (DF) can be defined as a set of computational software applied in the manufacturing design, development, implementation and operation. The goal of this work is to investigate DF's available resources in the analysis of workforce and machinery required for changes in the production scenarios in a determined automobile model. Therefore, a theoretical framework is developed. Afterwards, there is an investigation of the resources available for this application, actually commercialized by the three main software supply companies for DF. The results of the research are presented and discussed. Suggestions for future developments are identified, and the work is finished with the pertinent considerations.

This work was motivated by the specific needs of a materials flow and packing planning sector (PFME), within a manufacturing engineering department of a vehicle assembly company in Brazil. In this sector, there is a growing need to obtain prototype parts in the shortest time and at the lowest cost possible in order to carry out static prototype tests of the special packing and transportation racks used in this company, since these racks need to be ready to assist the preparation phase of the series production of the vehicle. The objective of this work is to survey the academic theory and the existing literature in order to find an application proposal of rapid prototyping (RP) techniques to make the parts used in the rack tests, thus reducing time and acquisition costs.

Most multinational companies have searched for cooperation within their units around the world when developing global products. To achieve this goal, those companies are making use of project teams whose members are geographically dispersed and culturally diverse. That context introduces more complexity to project management techniques especially on what concerns the communication among the project staff. Based on a bibliography research, this work intends to analyze how communication is affected by transnational context, what the importance of communication is to reach the project goals, and how it is possible to coordinate and communicate activities and information throughout multicultural and dispersed project members.

In the early 1990s, Brazilian automotive industries have testified a new scenario with a competitiveness increased due to the establishment of foreign companies, which forced them to follow new strategies to maintain its competitiveness in the market. Innovation and quality become priority, as well as new technologies and product cost optimization. More specifically, the focus on current automotive products cost reduction is nowadays one of the most important strategies to provide significant increase in profits and market share of companies. The purpose of this paper is to introduce case studies and the technical and economical benefits of product optimization process applied in current automotive components, where the requirements of quality maintenance, performance and cost reductions are emphasized.