Dodge Viper: Chrysler Innovation Meets Concurrent Engineering
Founded in 1925, Chrysler Motors has innovated the automobile industry for decades, but the company radically changed its engineering approach to car making in the late 1980’s with the design and release of the Dodge Viper.
Many of the automotive features we now consider standard – high-compression engines, disc brakes, power steering and the alternator – were developed by Chrysler engineers. Over the last century, Chrysler has maintained a successful market presence by innovating not only its design and material fabrication, but also by taking new approaches to the design, engineering, and procurement processes that support car production.
In the early 1980’s, Americans were buying more Japanese cars in the wake of the 1970’s gas crisis. Chrysler’s corporate performance was lagging the other major auto manufacturers when the company released the K-car, a radical departure from their long-standing rear-wheel drive to the front-wheel drive design. The design of the K-car line also included more plastic components to dramatically improve the power-to-weight ratio, providing a lighter, more fuel-efficient vehicle as a competitive offering in the changing automotive marketplace.
The aggregate affect of the K-car model line not only improved Chrysler’s financial bottom line, but also impacted the upstream design and downstream production models. Efficiency was the new prize in the market, and Chrysler was no stranger to innovating new features to entice buyers.
The market pressure to create ever more-efficient cars, together with their decoupled vendor model, positioned Chrysler to take advantage of the time-to-market benefits of a tightly integrated model such as concurrent engineering.
The key to concurrent engineering is not simply the overarching parallel process model, it’s the approach to team design, interaction, and management. Concurrent engineering is built on a cross-functional team and requires constant collaboration between all disciplines to achieve maximum schedule performance. As elements are discovered and defined, all teams consider impacts to design, procurement, production, integration, and maintenance. Team members consist of subject matter experts in their area, and focus their expertise on product development. Systems engineering tools are utilized to capture feature relationships and evolving design artifacts.
Design and production is iterative in this model, and teams must understand concurrent engineering as it may vary widely from their normal team-design process model. In the concurrent model, no single group owns any phase in the product lifecycle; engineering, procurement, production, vendors, and marketing are all involved in product design and delivery decisions. Features and capabilities are considered from an parallel, integrated perspective, rather than the typical waterfall phase finish-to-start model. It’s important for teams to embrace the concurrent model in order for it to succeed, and this will require training and orienting the team to the overall process.
Chrysler began their concurrent engineering process in earnest in 1989 with the introduction of the Dodge Viper, when the product team created an operational prototype model that was the pace car for the 1991 Indianapolis 500. In 1992, the Viper was available for sale, and Chrysler had successfully proven the concurrent engineering model that would become the basis for other product lines.
At the time, the concept-to-street production cycle for new auto models averaged almost eight years for the major car manufacturers; Chrysler’s goal was to reduce that cycle by half with the introduction of Dodge Viper. The team achieved Viper production delivery in three years.
