Automotive material uncertainty and business risk at the concept phase using existing metadata.

Abstract

New product development has attracted a significant amount of academic attention, and its application within the automotive sector is no exception. The research presented in this thesis places its focus at the concept phase of the process and seeks to identify the commercial uncertainties allowing them to be treated as business risks for mitigation during the design phase of the new product development. Within this research, the attention is on the uncertainties concealed within the tier 1 cost base, commercial uncertainties, such as sales and product function are out of scope. The presented research develops a hybrid methodology which builds upon existing cost estimating tools and existing metadata to provide a structured identification of the uncertainties and the scale of business risks to which new product developments are exposed. The hybrid methodology is first applied to a simple example to present the fundamental notions and then to the automotive domain to demonstrate its application. The results obtained confirm that the hybrid methodology allows uncertainty, hitherto hidden during new product development concept phase evaluation to be realised as potential business risks.

Date of Award	1 May 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Chris Brace (Supervisor) & Linda Newnes (Supervisor)