Introduction
BMW is facing quality problems and competition from Japanese entrants. Japanese automakers offer luxury cars at a lower price and higher quality with shorter lead times for new product introduction. The higher quality of Japanese cars has also redefined industry standards and customers are starting to expect higher quality in cars.
To improve quality, BMW proposed a prototyping approach where prototypes are built with technology, equipment and workers that resemble the factory. Engineers will design pre-production tools and use them to create the prototypes. Prototype parts will be procured from production suppliers instead of prototype suppliers.
Analysis of Current Prototyping Approach
The main advantage of the current approach is the flexibility it offers to the design process. Design changes can be made very late in the design cycle and at low cost since specialized tools are not required. This allows BMW to be more responsive to changing consumer tastes and include new state-of-the-art technology into their design quickly.
The major disadvantage, however, is that handcrafting the prototypes without considerations for manufacturing, results in scalability problems during production. If there are any assembly or production problems, designers have to modify the design and change the production processes, resulting in long lead times. Refer to Exhibit 1.
Causes and consequences of quality problems
The quality problems BMW faces are a result of the inefficiency of the current prototyping approach. One reason is the lack of time to identify and solve the many minor quality problems. This is because most of the time is spent on identifying and solving the big problems in the prototyping and pilot production stages. As such, mino ...