Product types and supplier roles in product development an.pdfVIP

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 49, NO. 2, MAY 2002 107 Product Types and Supplier Roles in Product Development: An Exploratory Analysis Timothy M. Laseter and Kamalini Ramdas Abstract—Manufacturers today often strive toward early fact, add cost and slow down the development process. For ex- supplier involvement in product development. Yet the research ample, a supplier of exhaust systems noted that a U.S. vehicle literature offers limited guidance on this issue to manufacturing manufacturer generated needless design iterations by involving companies and suppliers, and often assumes a “one-size-fits-all” approach. In this paper, we empirically examine whether suppliers the exhaust supplier before the “engine strategy” had stabilized. for different sourced products play distinctly different roles in Though the exhaust system must be precisely tuned to the engine product development, by analyzing survey data on a wide range of characteristics, most of the fine-tuning can be done with minor sourced automotive products. We use cluster analysis to identify adjustments to the exhaust system design. Involving the exhaust four different groupings of sourced products, based on differences supplier early encourages customer engineers to constantly re- along three dimensions: the nature of the sourced products, their cost structures, and the nature of the original equipment manu- quest tuning iterations that have no effect on the engine design, facturer (OEM)-supplier interaction in product development. We and that ultimately have to be repeated oncetheenginedesignsta- further test the usefulness of our scheme via a set of validating bilizes. Clearly