2023 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
German and Japanese Auto-parts Suppliers' Project Management
| Project/Area Number |
18K12842
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Early-Career Scientists
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| Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
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| Review Section |
Basic Section 07080:Business administration-related
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| Research Institution | Ritsumeikan University (2023)
Kyushu University (2018-2022) |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2018-04-01 – 2024-03-31
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| Keywords | Project Management / Automotive Industry |
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
First, it was found that suppliers indeed have to customize components for each customer. In one case, a bearings supplier reported that while industrial bearings are standardized off-the-shelf products, automotive bearings were customized for each customer. Second, regarding project management, it was found that suppliers may resort to other strategic approaches apart from information sharing across projects. Suppliers may adopt more modular product designs, meaning that besides customer-specific parts of a design, there are parts which are standardized across a product family, suggesting that engineering-based strategy may substitute for project management. Overall, these preliminary findings suggest that project management may be less important than anticipated as supplier firms can use modularization of standard components and the creation of standardized design interfaces as an alternative to intra-organizational information sharing and cross-project lesson drawing.
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| Free Research Field |
Business Management
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| Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements |
The significance of the findings is that project management of automotive suppliers may be less important than anticipated as suppliers can use engineering-based strategies as an alternative to project management based information exchange and intra-organisational learning.
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