New product development process re-engineering for a chinese automobile tirm

摘要

Undertaking a NPD effort provides many challenges to automobile firms and their managers in China. These challenges mainly include defining and organizing the activities to undertake during the NPD process. Study in recent years shows consistent relationship between marketing orientation and successful automobile products. In has become increasingly important for automobile firms to adopt market-orientated NPD. However, The typical product development process of Chinese automobile firms is engineering-driven, designed to deal solely with technical risks, but obviously not adapted to the market ones. NPD process is being rubuilt in Chang-An Automobile Ltd. to avoid the market risks, and its conceptual framework and rules is presented in this paper. The new NPD process consists of three sub-processes: product definition, product engineering development, and manufacturing-sale-after service. The product definition sub-process is designed to deal with product strategy managemdent, market and technical assessment. The engineering development sub-process is addressed to make a product engineering development plan (development schedule, development cost, product quality, and manufacturing cost), generate product concept, implemdent product engineerifng design and manufacturing, in-house product testing and customer prototyping testing. The third subprocess is focused on production start-up, arket launch, and disposal of customer's request.