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BIZCHINA> Top Biz News
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R&D management of Chinese auto industry
(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2008-04-14 16:57 Based on intensive interviews of target companies and its huge database, the consultancy evaluates the current status of R&D centers, and summarizes their major strengths and weaknesses. Take a leading local OEM as example. Like most players in the automotive industry, the R&D Center faced increasing business complexity due to lack of knowledge about customer demands and an increasing number of concurrent projects. After intensive interviews and analysis sessions, it summarizes the status in customer integration and market intelligence as follows: n There is no clear segmentation of target customer groups. There are no brand characteristics defined which can be taken into account in development. n Only rudimentary input about customer and market requirements is provided to R&D by internal customers. n No regular market research tools besides qualitative interviews are used. n Customers are not involved in product definition and design verification. n Requirements are either defined in a fuzzy way or directly translated into technical requirements, and development results are not checked against original customer requirements. The development of an enterprise needs best practices to follow, and it is the same case with R&D. With benchmarking, to make the role model more transparent, and understand specific problems, enterprises can base on the requirements and long–term goal to select competitors and overseas best practices. Please see figure 4 for benchmarking in different dimensions: Figure 4 Benchmarking in customer integration & market intelligence
Source: Arthur D. Little (For more biz stories, please visit Industries)
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