An Integrated Decision Making Framework for Automotive Product Development with the Supply Chain

It is evidenced that manufacturing firms in order to be more competitive in market, must continuously update their product offers in order to better satisfy the customers’ requirements. Management should use the supply chain features more frequently, as the increased rate of product introductions, demands more from a business and needs more efforts to deliver the new products effectively and efficiently. To deliver the products at the targeted cost, time, and quality, the supply chain must be aligned with New Product Development (NPD) decisions. This will allow the manufacturing firm to overcome problems such as (partially) failed product launches due to the lack of product availability because of insufficient capacities. The integrated NPD-Supply Chain Management (SCM) enterprise has the benefit of increased supply chain capability, thus increasing the effectiveness of new product introductions and improves enterprise's performance. This research mainly focuses on automotive sector due to its supply chain environment being the subject of extensive research within its product development integration. The research also introduces the development of a framework that integrates flow of activities within the manufacturing enterprises and shows that this contributes all the business functions. It also aims to focus on using current modelling tools to represent the product development processes of its Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and its suppliers. Through this research, the aim is to link the product development (PD) within a SCM context for an extended enterprise and to investigate the effect of the integration of SCM with NPD. The possible integration points will provide baseline guidelines to identify the key decision making points within the entire supply chain.