new product development

Automotive manufacturers increasingly use the concept of supplier integration. However, the concept often is attached with an increased dependency of the buyer towards his suppliers, which generates self-induced monopolies. The inherent erosion of efficient market mechanisms, combined with an increased supplier power due to consolidation processes, can lead for the manufacturer to a disfavoring profit redistribution. Recurring controversy in current buyer-supplier relationships show that pie sharing approaches need to be adopted to the concepts of supplier integration.

After the crisis being classified as completely weathered, Germany is apparently in a flourishing economy. This makes future investments interesting, however, political uncertainty and its economic impact invoke fears of another recession. Many companies have already noticed that research and development provides a lot of investment potential. Thus, the challenge is not to identify required changes of business management, but to analyse and evaluate them in compliance with economic aspects. This is the only way to assure long-term protection of contracts and business success through maintenance and sustainable improvement of research and development. This article presents an approach to adequate optimization of research and development, which can be especially applied situations with scarce human resources.

The successful management of product development projects presents a key success factor that is based on shorter time-to-market times. Development projects are known for their complexity that often leads to failure in keeping deadlines and overspending of project budgets. Innovative methods for prospective project description and complexity determination are necessary in order to meet the demands made of product development projects’ management. Thus, indicators for achieving an optimized development process can already be attained in the project planning phase.