Automotive Consulting:
Innovation & Product Development

Innovation is the primary driver of top-line success. Companies focused on developing major innovation grow faster and are more highly valued than competitors that concentrate on incremental innovation. Innovation is a complex, interdependent system, which must be viewed holistically to affect lasting improvement.

We help companies improve their ability to innovate and develop new products, such as new features and technologies. The front-end of innovation, idea generation, can be improved through enabling tools and technology, along with establishing an underlying culture of continuous innovation.

The back-end of innovation, execution, can be managed like a synchronous factory for maximum competitive advantage — ensuring the product content matches customer requirements, delivering more personalized products by facilitating mass customization, and aligning new products design content with its related market, customer, and regulatory requirements.

A.T. Kearney Consulting Expertise: Innovation & Product Development

• Design cost reduction consulting — we form teams within companies to examine distinct products or client product modules, with each team applying a systematic methodology to achieve breakthrough results by stripping out product features that customers want but don't pay for, eliminating excessive or cozy engineering specifications, adopting design best practices, optimizing the design to minimize all cost drivers, and identifying a cost-optimal supply base to support the product
• Design for quality — we help companies reduce warranty costs: realign warranty terms and conditions while maintaining or increasing satisfaction; eliminate warranty costs that are claimed due to errors or fraudulent behavior at the dealership; ensure problems are fixed right the first time at the dealership; eliminate problems that involve engineering, manufacturing and suppliers; prevent problems from occurring through integrity in design, manufacturing, and with suppliers; and employ supplier charge backs to ensure fair cost allocation and supplier incentives
• Engineering effectiveness — we help companies define core competencies, identify efficiency gaps, and create a strategy for product development within the organization reducing overall product lifecycle costs through earlier design stability, accelerating product delivery with concurrent product development, and increasing team accountability
• Engineering change management — to limit profit leakage and enable competitive pricing, we work with companies to better manage engineering changes throughout the product lifecycle, including identifying and costing causes, pricing and negotiating solutions, implementing changes, and ensuring collection

For a follow-up discussion, Contact The Automotive Consulting Practice.