Knowledge management practices in automotive safety attribute development

Organizations strive continuously to become efficient. Over the years many of them have tried to attain this through streamlining or reengineering their product development practices. 'While some of them succeed others are less successful. Product development organizations within automotive enterprises are not different in this regard. Most reengineering efforts seem to concentrate on tasks and schedule. Detailed schedules are cascaded while the identification of enablers on delivering to the new schedule is left to individual teams in the organization. At the working level, the reengineering process is misunderstood as abandonment of things gone right from past practices. This sometimes results in teams reinventing solutions to similar problems from the past. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that a key enabler for success in any reengineering effort is to understand existing knowledge management practices and reuse them in the context of proposed changes. To do so, existing practices would have to be captured in usable formats. Proposed changes to existing product development process within an automotive product development organization are studied.

Department dc:contributor.department

System Design and Management Program.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Krishnaswami, Ram N. (Ram Narian)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Daniel Whitney.

• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/35111

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35111