Knowledge management practices in automotive safety attribute development

Abstract

Organizations strive continuously to become efficient. Over the years many of them have tried to attain this through streamlining or reengineering their product development practices. 'While some of them succeed others are less successful. Product development organizations within automotive enterprises are not different in this regard. Most reengineering efforts seem to concentrate on tasks and schedule. Detailed schedules are cascaded while the identification of enablers on delivering to the new schedule is left to individual teams in the organization. At the working level, the reengineering process is misunderstood as abandonment of things gone right from past practices. This sometimes results in teams reinventing solutions to similar problems from the past. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that a key enabler for success in any reengineering effort is to understand existing knowledge management practices and reuse them in the context of proposed changes. To do so, existing practices would have to be captured in usable formats. Proposed changes to existing product development process within an automotive product development organization are studied.

(cont.) Comparisons are made between existing and proposed product development process. To focus this comparison and understand the changes better, the development tasks undertaken by a safety attribute team within the product development group is studied in detail. An analysis of the development process undertaken by the safety team to existing schedule is performed through case studies. Based on this analysis scenarios are developed for the proposed changes. From the case studies it is apparent that formalized knowledge management practices in formats usable by development teams will help in reducing iteration time through cascade of robust targets. Recommendations are made to build upon and sustain recently implemented knowledge management practices within the safety attribute team. An implementation roadmap for the new knowledge management frame work is provided.