Design for relevance concurrent engineering approach: integration of IATF 16949 requirements and design for X techniques

With the growth of sustainability challenges, the automotive is regarded as one of the most important and strategic industries in the manufacturing sector. Reducing time in the product development process, seeking higher product quality, maintaining sustainable products, lowering product cost in the manufacturing process, and fulfilling customers’ requirements are the key factors of the success of a company. To achieve these requirements, automotive companies must consider the use of new sustainable models that ensure design efforts, customer, and societal needs from product ideation until its end-of-life. To do so, the leading companies adopt Design for X (DFX) as a concurrent approach, which considers several issues through different factors Xs. However, with the modified applications for various domains, several researchers have developed many DFX techniques. This multiplicity makes it difficult for researchers and practitioners to keep up with DFX development. Hence, the aim of this paper is first to use mixed and different techniques to organize and select the most prominent DFXs that consider quality and customer satisfaction strategies in designing automotive product. Second, a conceptual framework called, Design for Relevance (DFRelevance) is introduced. It addresses the design factors (guidelines) of each DFX and their associated modules to facilitate the collaboration between designers and all the project team during the whole product lifecycle. Furthermore, a modeling approach based on unsupervised learning is used to accomplish DFRelevance concerns. The aim of this approach is to cluster similar modules into homogenous groups to facilitate the simultaneous implementation of the concurrent engineering strategy.