Lectures

The automotive industry currently faces substantial challenges. The tradeoff between customer demand, technological drivers, the increasing competitive pressure and tightening legislative framework conditions has to be solved. By elaborating advanced strategies and a profound knowledge of the underlying methodologies, both suppliers and vehicle manufacturers can meet this challenges.

This course is composed of two parts. First, after introducing the basic stakeholders and developments of the automotive industry, methods for cooperation management, strategic technology management and customer-oriented product development are presented. Based on this set of strategies and methods, current technology trends like electrification, lightweight design, modularization and connectivity are presented and evaluated, considering their impact on the evolution of the automotive value chain. In the second part of this course, the focus is put on aspects of vehicle production processes and includes topics like “lean production”, “supply chain management”, “ramp-up-management” and the “digital factory”.