Engineering work breakdown and assignment for global product development

Abstract

Companies are always looking for ways to reduce their costs, cost reductions which allow companies to increase their overall profits. There are various cost reductions strategies, such as: change materials and/or design of the products, change suppliers, and offshore engineering. This last strategy, offshore engineering, is a common practice in today's global industries. This thesis applies the cost-reduction strategy of offshore engineering to the automotive industry. Specifically, this thesis presents an analysis of the Seat Subsystem, which assists the corporation in selecting which components of the subsystem are optimal to be offshored. Based on product architecture design structure matrices, this analysis identifies clusters of components within the Seat Subsystem which are highly interrelated. After adding three variables: experience needed to develop each of the components, current experience of the offshore office, and supplier location of these components, a proposal of which components should be offshored is presented. Further, in this thesis a Process/Organization DSM is used to identify when in the seat development process the Seat Engineers have closer relations with other departments within the organization. The results of this Process/Organization DSM will assist the company in creating travel plans for the engineers. After establishing which components of the seat should be offshored, an additional analysis is presented which assists the organization in determining where to offshore these components. This analysis is based on three frameworks: CAGE, ADDING, and Porter's and virtual diamond. A summary of the results of this analysis presents a quantitative evaluation of three offshoring options: China, India, and Mexico. In addition, in this thesis an analysis is presented to determine how the Seat Organization Architecture needs to be adapted in order to support the Offshore Strategy. This organization transformation is based on three methodologies: Enterprise Architecture Sequence Model, 4P's of Strategy, and Seven Strategy Questions. At the end of this thesis, a six-step process is presented to assist other organizations when an offshore strategy is needed to breakdown the development of a product or system and determine where to offshore each of the components.