Set Based Concurrent Engineering
En undersökning för Scania CV AB
This Master thesis has been carried out at Scania CV AB in Södertälje, in collaboration withKTH, The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. The focus of this Master thesis isSetBased Concurrent Engineering(SBCE), with the purpose of answering the questions: what isSBCE, how does it work, and for what purposes is it applied.It was early established thatSBCE is often included as a part of Lean product development,which in its turn is often related to Toyota?s way of working. TheSBCE method includesworking with multiple solutions in parallel, eliminating weak alternatives throughout thewhole process. In opposite to a conventional product development process, where it iscommon one at an early stage tries to identify and choose the most promising alternative.Despite the appearance ofSBCE as a resource consuming method, figures from Toyotaindicates the opposite, thatSBCE is in fact a very effective way of working compared to othermore traditional methods.The process of this Master thesis was divided into three phases. An extensive informationgathering part was carried out with the purpose of compiling available material aboutSBCE.Subsequently, an overview of the present work procedures at Scania was gathered, but nosigns ofSBCE were found. Based on the theory and the empirical results, an extensivediscussion is presented. This constitutes the base for two presentations produced: onesummarizing to be presented at KTH, and one extended version to be used as educationmaterial aboutSBCE at Scania. These are however not presented in this report. Consequentlythe main purpose of this Master thesis has then been to compile and present available materialaboutSBCE.Conclusions for this thesis are thereby mostly drawn from available literature. It wasestablished that major differences betweenSBCE and traditional product development exist. Itwas however not possible to decide how importantSBCE alone has been for the success ofToyota. It was also concluded, based on the literature, thatSBCE may work both as a systemfor minimizing risks as well as maximizing knowledge in product development. ButSBCEshould however, for maximizing its potential, be accompanied and supported by a few othersystems and tools.