Set Based Concurrent Engineering

Sammanfattning

This Master thesis has been carried out at Scania CV AB in Södertälje, in collaboration with

KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. The focus of this Master thesis is

Set

Based Concurrent Engineering

(SBCE

), with the purpose of answering the questions: what is

SBCE

, how does it work, and for what purposes is it applied.

It was early established that

SBCE is often included as a part of Lean product development

,

which in its turn is often related to Toyota’s way of working. The

SBCE

method includes

working with multiple solutions in parallel, eliminating weak alternatives throughout the

whole process. In opposite to a conventional product development process, where it is

common one at an early stage tries to identify and choose the most promising alternative.

Despite the appearance of

SBCE

as a resource consuming method, figures from Toyota

indicates the opposite, that

SBCE

is in fact a very effective way of working compared to other

more traditional methods.

The process of this Master thesis was divided into three phases. An extensive information

gathering part was carried out with the purpose of compiling available material about

SBCE

.

Subsequently, an overview of the present work procedures at Scania was gathered, but no

signs of

SBCE

were found. Based on the theory and the empirical results, an extensive

discussion is presented. This constitutes the base for two presentations produced: one

summarizing to be presented at KTH, and one extended version to be used as education

material about

SBCE

at Scania. These are however not presented in this report. Consequently

the main purpose of this Master thesis has then been to compile and present available material

about

SBCE

.

Conclusions for this thesis are thereby mostly drawn from available literature. It was

established that major differences between

SBCE

and traditional product development exist. It

was however not possible to decide how important

SBCE

alone has been for the success of

Toyota. It was also concluded, based on the literature, that

SBCE

may work both as a system

for minimizing risks as well as maximizing knowledge in product development. But

SBCE

should however, for maximizing its potential, be accompanied and supported by a few other

systems and tools.