Product Development Projects in Special Vehicle Industry : Aspects on Time-to-Market

Abstract: In today’s ever more competitive market for automobile manufactures, companies have to compete beyond basic means of high quality, differentiation and low cost they also need to apply speed in their product development process in order to meet market demand. The special vehicle companies that base their products on standard automobiles are also highly affected by this competition to deliver their products accordingly. The total time it takes to identify, develop and deliver a product or service to the market is defined as time-tomarket. An increased need for speed in the product development corresponds to a reduction in acompany’s time-to-market. This thesis investigates strategies and means of cutting time-to-market and how these can be applied to a company in the special vehicle industry to gain a competitive advantage. Through the study of literature in the field of product development with focus on the time to-market aspect this thesis has investigated what strategic factors and actions that existsand how these can be applied to a company in the special vehicle industry. As empirical object the Swedish company Nilsson Special Vehicles was studied through interviews and access to company material. The most important results concluded in this thesis as factors and activities in reducing time-to-market are, • Reduction of bureaucracy and improved fast decision-making. • Adoption of Integrated Product Teams and Cross-Functional Teams • Performing Simultaneous engineering in which all interested parties activelyparticipate. These fundamental structural ways of carrying out work in an organization are the most important ones that a company can adopt in achieving time-to-market reductions. This thesis also concludes that Nilsson’s product development is effective and already performs many of the activities written about in this study. Although the company couldpossibly achieve even further reductions in their time-to-market, one improvement wouldbe to increase the amount of activities performed concurrently in the product development.