Innovation Management and Simulations - Early innovative product exploration with modern working methods and technical simulations

Abstract: The shortening of the development lead time for products is heavily affecting the need for having a strategic approach to product development methodology. It is also of the utmost importance to use the right tools and have an understanding concerning the digitalization of the industry. Presented in this Master Thesis, conducted after an incitement from Scania, is a strategic approach towards a modern product concept development and how technical simulations can be used as a tool to speed up the processing time. The area of investigation is limited to the Research & Development department RT and the suggested activities of change will be concerning the current processes at the focus company. The Master Thesis was performed through a case study at Scania, a literature review from published resources and a minor benchmarking to aim for generalized results. The results show that the use of technical simulations works as an efficient resource tool when implementing a modern product concept development with an Agile focus for both the design and simulation engineer. The supportive aspect comes from the fact that the tool could be used iteratively, handle continuous changes, provides a holistic approach as well as system thinking. Three main difficulties were retrieved within the current process at Scania, such as lack of explorative space, unclear definition of a concept as well as a process that is too slow. The activity of change would be to implement an extra process step in the current concept development strategy at Scania as well as using digital demonstrators as concepts. Difficulties within the organisation were found with the role of the design engineer and the lack of collaboration between test and simulation engineers. The solutions presented concerning the organisation would be to rework the current role of the design engineer and change the way of communicating between design, simulation, and test groups.