Your Challenges during Product Emergence

The product emergence process, casually called PEP, covers the development of the product, and - with mechatronic products - the development of the production process. The PEP is the most cost critical and most cost relevant process at automotive and mechatronics manufacturers: In the development of embedded software its performance determines 100% their costs; in the development of mechanics and electronics 90% of the costs of the later series production, logistics, maintenance, repair and disposal are determined by its execution.

• Development Times

  have shrunk to less than half in the past 20 years whilst there is a multiplication of technical complexity and a prolongation of the supply chain.

• Number of Variants

  per product line have increased rapidly and are still continuing to increase, because there are manifold attempts to reach any customer with any requirement by means of variant diversity.

• Carry-over Parts Management and Reusability

  are key success factors to reduction of complexity, risks, and costs in operations and logistics and in software development respectively.

• Scopes of Delivery

  in the B2B business have decreased and still continue to decrease regarding volumes and validity times, because clients try to mitigate risks from long term agreements.

• Supplier Monitoring

  extends increasingly to the entire period of development projects and demands tightly scheduled reports on progress and traceability.

• Falling Prices

  are caused by competition at any price, by exploiting cheap wage potentials and by changes in product strategies opposing feature-dedicated cheap products to omnipotent high-tech products.

• Emission and Safety Regulations

  affect innovation and development organisation tremendously. Number and complexity of the standards and guidelines to be considered demand large fractions of development capacity.

• Technologies from Other Sectors

  conquer the areas of innovation in the automotive and mechanical engineering: electronics, sensors, software, materials, joining methods, bionics, nanotechnology, etc.

  Electronics and software are becoming cross-cutting technologies in the automotive and mechanical engineering.

• Overflowing Requirements Specifications

  - industry 4.0 says hello - reflect the shift from the dominance of mechanics to machinery and vehicles, where progress is almost exclusively determined by software features and information exchange.