Simulation Driven Product Development : How it can be combined with Lean Philosophy to achieve increased product development efficiency

Abstract: During the last decades the product lifecycle has been shortened and as a consequence the majority of manufacturing companies have focused on decrease the time to market. Several companies within the automotive industry have during the last years implemented Simulation Driven Product Development as a method to reduce lead time, increase quality and reduce development cost for their products. This study is divided into three areas; (1) Investigate the applicability of Simulation Driven Product Development in a Lean Product Development environment. (2) Examine the preconditions for implementing Simulation Driven Product Development. (3) Study the possible effects in a product development process of using simulations performed by design engineers. By studying available literature in the area of Lean and Simulation Driven Product Development the consistence of the two product development philosophies are rather high. Simulation Driven Product Development tends to support the principles of Lean as well as reduce different kinds of waste that normally is present at a R&D department. In order to implement a Simulation Driven Product Development a number of preconditions were identified; e.g. knowledge and experience within both physical and virtual testing, cross functional synchronizations, trust for simulation results and incentives from management. These factors, among a couple of others, are according to the theory and case studies preconditions for a successful implementation where the primary case is based on Scania, but Saab Automobile AB, Jaguar Land Rover and AB Volvo is also analyzed in the benchmarking study. Simulations performed by design engineers will increase the potential of Simulation Driven Product Development in several ways. A major finding from the study is that it enhances the understanding for properties of the items among design engineers. The increased understanding also increase the knowledge and decrease the learning cycle time for the design engineers. It also seems to be a resource efficient way since waiting times are reduced. The need of support from simulation groups might also reduce the communication barriers between different groups and increase the cross functional work.