Systems engineering in automotive product development : a guide to initiate organisational transformation

Systems Engineering (SE) is an engineering method that has rarely been applied in Automotive Product Development, despite its noticeable positive effects in other engineering fields. With increasing interests, firms and scholars have started to discover its impact in the segment, however internal hurdles appear when it comes to implementation practices at organisations across the industry. This paper presents a comprehensive guideline, results and good practices on the SE implementation, developed in Formula SAE (FSAE), which is a relevant model environment of automotive industry. The impact of applying SE show project results improvement in cost, time and quality aspects, although, the maturity of SE should be assessed at the system of systems level. Outcomes gained from FSAE have been validated by in-depth interviews with SE experts, engineers and managers affiliated at technical development departments of 4 different automotive OEMs. These practitioners provide evaluated practices as employee involvement, applying learning by doing, and playing with architectures relevant and feasible in industrial setting, however emphasized expected impeding factors as sluggishness and general resistance to organisational changes.