“Successful automobile companies meet or exceed customer expectations," says Ken Ragsdell, professor of engineering management at UMR and director of the university’s Design Engineering Center. “Today companies like GM realize they have to have flexible product development processes. For example, introducing a product variant like a removable roof or flexible hard top shouldn’t take the same amount of time as a completely new vehicle."

The UMR team is creating a new computer program to relate a vehicle’s technical performance with customer satisfaction. Such customer design forecasting should help GM “design the best quality automobile," says Jungeui Hong, a post doctoral fellow at UMR and visiting scholar.

Changes made to lower-level system components affect automotive performance at the system level, which in turn affects overall consumer satisfaction, says Elizabeth Cudney, a doctoral student in engineering management at UMR.

“It’s not a static world," Ragsdell adds. “Suppliers are changing – you hope they are improving – but it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes a supplier tries something to save a nickel and it ends up costing you a dollar."

GM product developers will use the tool to determine what adjustments should be made during the development process to most economically meet new customer perceptions. They’ll also examine how suppliers’ performance characteristics affect customer satisfaction.

“For a company to make informed decisions about product design, it must understand the impact of these system changes on the consumer," Cudney says.

Out with the old, in with the new

GM’s current system of customer demand forecasting requires significant time and data, says project manager Kioumars Paryani, a GM Technical Fellow focused on customer-driven quality methods at the Vehicle Development Research Lab in Warren, Mich. UMR’s technique, just a few months old, has already shown promise by correlating a real attribute using significantly less time and data.

Design engineers are always making decisions, from selecting design concepts to choosing components. Each of these decisions is influenced by quality, cost, safety, and other considerations. UMR’s tool will help designers select from available alternatives and corresponding hardware sets to “fulfill functional requirements – as customers perceive it – and perform cost comparisons for selected alternatives," says Vivek Jikar, a graduate student in engineering management.

“We’ll use these tools to go from piece-part to system-level performance and functionally track performance level," Ragsdell says. “In addition, we’ll use pattern recognition techniques and other tools for diagnosis and forecasting to allow us to develop a model that decision makers can use."

Interview with UMR research team
KUMR feature on improving the automotive development process, hosted by UMR's Vice Provost for Research Wayne Huebner

Interview (RealPlayer format)