Knowledge Management Framework in New Product Development Projects of Automotive Industries

In recent year, industries are faced to the challenges with a dynamic environment. The consumer preferences are subject to changes quickly. New regulations and the climate of competitions among companies stimulate changes at the market placed product. New product development teams are challenged to accelerate their work to shorten product time-to-market. This is due to the product life cycle is getting shorter and to avoid change of preference before the product launched. The new product team's knowledge of the character of the previous product is needed to accelerate the process of developing new products. The involvement of supplier and user in preparing new product should not be forgotten. The knowledge they have about previous products must also be collected. Users may have complaints on the previous product, while suppliers may have difficulties in creating the supply. This paper proposes a knowledge management framework in developing new product in order to improve product quality and shorten time-to-market with involvement of user and supplier perspective. A model was developed based on literature review and expert interview. The proposed model has three dynamic processes: knowledge creation, knowledge diffusion, and knowledge storage. A design structured matrix (DSM) was created to analyze the relationship between stages in the framework. Experts state that the knowledge gained at the end of each project is reused as input to the next project. To test the framework, a case study is planned in an automotive company. Further research is suggested to validate the proposed framework in different industries.