Manufacturing Engineering Challenges In Product Development Of Software Based Systems In Automotive Industry: A Case Study

摘要

As most future automotive innovations will be realized with software, the automotive industry is facing a tremendous increase in software engineering. Consequently, the involvement of manufacturing engineering in product development has been intensified since the increase in software based systems implies a greater number of product variants and a higher degree of complexity that has to be managed in the manufacturing processes. The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of the manufacturing engineering activities in product development, specifically focusing on the development of software and electronics in the automotive industry. It is presented as a case study with a qualitative approach where data were collected from documents and in interviews with practitioners at a Swedish automotive company. Three main strategies were used to obtain validity of the results: 1) prolonged involvement, 2) triangulation and 3) peer debriefing. It can be concluded that there are challenges in the research area since 24 issues emerged from the data, which could be related to manufacturing engineering/development, product development and management & control activities. The results may primarily be used as input for improvements within the company and the methodology can be utilized by other organizations that are interested in founding their development of working methods and practice on empirically observed findings.