What is Muda

Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in automotive industry are faced with the conflicting goals of creating vehicles with higher reliability, increased feature content and quality while lowering model runs, reducing costs, and shorter developmental times. However, to achieve these goals is very difficult in a global product development environment that involves globally distributed OEMs and suppliers working on the components and subsystems of the same but a complex product like an automobile. This is especially true with regard to electronic systems in automotive industry due to the continued and significant increase in overall electrical content in a vehicle, and the historical short lifecycle of enabling technologies. For example, in the last three decades, electrical/electronics control has gone from 100% analog to primarily digital microprocessor based controls (Paras et al., 2004). As the level of integration occurs, automotive electronics are going to be challenged by software development and integration. As a result, it is going to increase overall product development time and cost. While it has been a growing concern for both academician and practitioners, the prior literature is still very limited in terms providing a clear or sufficiently structured framework to address the issues of global product development system. This chapter attempts to narrow down this gap by presenting a lean and global product development (GPD) framework and the necessary enablers to achieve this end. The framework is demonstrated through an automotive industry case study.