Jožef Duhovnik

Project-driven Concurrent Product Development:

When entering the global market, companies encounter several difficulties, the most severe being long product development times and too high costs of sequential product and process development. In order to overcome this problem, the companies will have to make a shift from sequential product development (which is wasteful regarding time and costs) to a project-driven concurrent product development as soon as possible. The article presents a procedure for project-driven concurrent product development by taking into account three strategic management methods: parallelness, standardization, and integration of product development processes. Also presented are the changes in organizational concept of the company, organization of processes, organization of work and organization of IT, which are required for a transition from sequential to concurrent product development. Finally, an analysis is presented on concurrent product development teams in a company; this analysis is a prerequisite for a transition to a new method of product development.

Teamwork as a Precondition for Simultaneous Product Realization

This article presents the savings in time and costs achieved by a transition from sequential to simultaneous product realization. Such a transition is not possible without prior well-organized teamwork or virtual teamwork. The article demonstrates the team structure in simultaneous product realization. A two-level team structure is suitable for small companies, with a core team on the first level and several project teams in simultaneous product realization loops on the second level. In order to ensure successful work of the core team and several project teams, appropriate communication tools are suggested and a communication matrix has been developed, defining information exchange during the execution of activities in simultaneous product realization. The communication matrix is used for identifying information system connections. The results of organizing teamwork and virtual teamwork are shown on a case study of simultaneous realization of a pedal assembly.

Concurrent realisation and quality assurance of products in the automotive industry

The aim of the concurrent product realisation and quality assurance of products is to shorten the realisation time, reduce realisation costs, increase the quality of products and thus increase customer satisfaction. In a case study of a project of the concurrent realisation of products (components for the automotive industry), it is shown how the requirements of quality standards for the automotive industry can be integrated in processes of the concurrent product realisation project, based on track-and-loop principle and three strategies: parallelness, standardisation and integration. This article gives an overview of quality-related standards in the automotive industry, the principles of sequential and concurrent product realisation and the course of concurrent product realisation and quality assurance of products in the automotive industry. Five loops of concurrent product realisation processes are defined for the automotive industry, as well as seven milestones of advanced product quality planning. A course of concurrent realisation and quality assurance of products in the automotive industry is shown in the case of the concurrent realisation of a car component.

Concurrent Engineering in Machinery

Application of concurrent engineering (CE) to machinery has to consider the type of production (individual, serial), product complexity and level of design. Product development (PD) involves four characteristic levels of design that requires specific activities. The characteristic design levels require definitions of the activities for providing the necessary software and other support for all phases of the design process. The following four levels of the design process have become established in the professional literature: original, innovative, variation and adaptive. Systematic analyses of product development processes (PDP), workflows, data and project management, in various companies, has shown that specific criteria have to be fulfilled for CE to be managed well. It is very important to consider the involvement of customers and suppliers, communication, team formation, process definition, organisation, and information system to fulfil minimum threshold criteria. The quality of communication and team formation, for example, primarily affects the conceptual phase. An information system is useful predominantly in the second half of the design process. It is shown with typical examples what is important in each PD phase. In the second part of this chapter reference models for CE methods are presented for PD in individual production (CE—DIP), in serial production of modules or elements (CE—DSPME) and in the manufacture of mass products (CE—DMMP) with an example from household appliances. The reference models for CE methods map PD phases and CE criteria for each type of production and have to be used together with case studies. They help to recognise strong and weak points of a CE application and show a way to improve processes and supporting CE methods.

Engineering change management maturity assessment model with lean criteria for automotive supply chain

ABSTRACT Supplier relationships in the automotive industry have changed fundamentally in recent decades owing to trends such as less vertical integration, global sourcing, simultaneous engineering, and the Internet. Suppliers have become much more important in terms of both production and development. The ability to manage engineering changes (EC) efficiently and reliably reflects the capability of the whole supply chain. EC is a modification of a products component after the product has entered serial production. This paper reviews engineering change management (ECM) and the application of lean methods into the product development process. The conclusions from the literature review are summarised in a model for assessing the maturity level of lean ECM. The model is tested within eight automotive component and system suppliers of different sizes, from 196 up to 77000 employees. The result of the survey is a comprehensive overview of ECM status with automotive suppliers. An important conclusion is that ECM should begin already during product development process. Knowledge management was recognised as a key enabler for reducing the number of ECs.

Risk Management of Cyclically Recurring Project Activities of Product Realisation

An extended risk-analysis procedure for new product/service realisation projects is presented in this paper. The usual risk analysis of project activities is based on evaluation of the probability that risk events occur and on evaluation of their consequences. Product/process realisation projects are cyclically recurring, so the third parameter has been added in the proposed procedure: an estimate of the incidence of risk events. On the basis of the calculated activity risk level in a three-dimensional risk analysis, a project team prepares preventive and corrective measures that should be taken according to the status indicators. An important advantage of the proposed solution is that the project manager and team members also take into account the recurring risk events in risk management. By successive elimination of sources of recurring risk events, the three-dimensional risk analysis of project activities can be transformed to the well-known two-dimensional risk analysis. A template was created in the MS project environment. The project team used the template for testing the proposed methodology in a case study of realisation of a die-cast tool for manufacturing a car component.

Theory and simulations of a thermionic emissions in a plain diode

The problem of biased diodes with thermionic emission has been first presented by Langmuir1 with a theoretical solution predicting the dependence on diode current on bias voltage in plane and cylindrical geometries. It has been shown that increase of density of emitting particles naturally leads to potential barrier with a non-monotonic potential profile. For many years, the value of potential minimum and its position have been considered as free parameters of this problem. Analytic, i.e. explicit, expressions for these parameters have been found only many years later2. However, the question of a stability of such a structure, with the potential bias as external control parameter, has not been fully investigated. In this paper we deal with this problem using grid-less tree-code method, in similar manner as was already done by Christlieb3 and Krek4 for the case of short-cut diode. The last investigations where focused into confirming high reliability of tree-code method, i.e. the same as in direct summation method, while in the present investigation, we apply our method to particular cases of engineering importance. Namely, we use same cases as exploited in Refs. [1, 2], which, in addition, implies cases with an arbitrary finite diode bias voltages ranging from zero (short-cut) to values much higher that the emitted particles thermal energy.

WIND BARRIER PROTECTION OF A BUILDING ON TOP OF A HILL

Abstract Numerical simulation is utilized to analyze the velocity profile around a building on top of a hill. The influence of different barrier configurations on the wind velocity around the building is analyzed. A three-dimensional model of a hill, building and barrier was created in SolidWorks, the grid was generated with CutCell Mesher in Ansys, and Ansys FLUENT was used as a solver. The turbulence modelused in the numerical simulation is the Shear Stress Ttransport (SST) model. The goal of this paper is to examine the wind barrier effect of various wind barrier configurations on the structure for different wind directions and to select an appropriate wind barrier. An appropriate barrier yields acceptable wind velocities in thedisembarkation area. The results show that all barrier configurations produce lower wind velocity in the disembarkation area of the building. The second and third barrier configurations gave the lowest wind velocities. In addition, the last barrier configuration also satisfies the barrier wind load criterion.