Logistics Integrated Product Development in the German Automotive Industry: Current State, Trends and Challenges

Abstract

Due to the increasing importance of logistics for the success of a company, automotive OEMs have started integrating logisticians into their product emergence processes to facilitate optimal systems design by incorporating logistics requirements. In this continuing process, many of the early issues have been improved by now; others will have to be solved in the future. This article contains a record of today’s most relevant problems with possible solutions based on circa 25 interviews carried out with automotive representatives of German OEMs and suppliers. It also includes a reference model of the automotive product emergence process and examples of best-practices in Design for Logistics.