F2008-07-011
Low Cost Solution for Automotive Product Development
Product marketing price is the key to the success in the fierce comptition now, product development with low cost is the prerequisite to achieve low cost product. This article first analysis product cost structure, and then investigates low cost solutions for new product development. 1) Enhance advanced cost budget supervision, Enhancing advanced cost budget planning and supervision is the first step to reduce program waste and low down cost. It includes four aspects such as feasibility study, development plan and development budget and value analysis. 2) Enhance marketing investigation and optimize product configuration, vehicle price has a very close relation to vehicle feature list. What functions and features customers need can be understood by the market investigation. For the low end market, customer put price in the first priority. Manual glass drop, black bumper fascia, mechnical steering system, rear drum brake and no air condition are considered to reduce material cost. 3) Optimize material types and gauges, As material cost take 54%~69% of product cost, so material type choose play a very important role. Different material varies greatly at the material cost with different characteristics. Material with similar characteristics may vary greatly at cost. To grasp the new material technology and process trend and material characteristics gives support to low down component material cost and manufacturing investment. 4) Apply component design concept and value analysis method, Components design concept (DCS), by means of allocating the vehicle technical specification to each component, defines the component durability, NVH, safety requirement. Based on the internal and external benchmarking, component and subsystem technical specification are given to support component design concept. DCS experiences several cycles of technical review and VCE review, finally achieve the given cost and mass target, as well as manufacturing and quality requirement. 5) Intensify design facing manufacture. Design facing manufacturing is to consider many factors related to manufacturing at the design stage, and confirm its manufacturability at its early stage and make sure that it can save material cost, reduce produce cycle and improve product quality. Design facing manufacturing can benefit die, welding, reducing pressing parts( reduce weld points, facility quantity), reduce material requirement and material usage. 6) Apply parts carry over and common platform strategy, vehicle and engine platform decides most of the product performances such as ride& handling, acceleration, fuel economy, safety, durability and engine dynacmic and FE performance. Vehicle and engine platform development take up most time of the whole vehicle development. So if we can adopt platform strategy and make fully use of existing platform, it will greatly reduce program risk and development cost. 7) Apply advanced development and management methods to increase development efficiency. CAD/CAE/CAM, rapid prototype process, and sysmatic product development procedure and methods can greatly reduce hardware investment and reduce product development cycle. It hence saves lots of money, achieve low cost target. Finally, it asks for the low cost product development environment, and also put forward two hottest issues related to low cost.
Session: Vehicle Development