System och komponenter i en personvagn

Rapport, 1987

Consumer report for the company in question (the Volvo Automobile Company) which is financed by the company and partly also by a research foundation. It is a matter of a work that in this particular case were carried out during nine years in a number of experimental workshops located outside the Chalmers University of Technology.

These workshops were financed by the Volvo Automobile and Truck companies. This achievement, as the final contribution to the Swedish automotive industry after having already treated this research field/problem area for more than two decades before this particular period if time (involving several junior and senior research competencies, as well as industrial and governmental foundings).

Specifically, this publication explains in one particular perspective how the authors dealt with s the product architecture and product variation of the automotive products disassembled, which proved to necessary to be carried out in one of the experimental workshops (FOOTNOTE 1). That is, besides of making the product architecture and product variation understandable for the parties involved (operators as well as practitioners), was the functions of the automotive products just as important to grasp.

Especially so with regard to if such (product) functions was something that was or gradually become evident during the assembly work, or alternatively if this was impossible to understand. In the latter case, such as chassis settings (that eventually to some extent would be possible to grasp), or many marketed-oriented codes (that are extremely difficult to decode) (several complete automobiles and one heavy truck chassis were disassembled combined with having product data accessible in form of paper print-outs as well as by appropriate computer connections to the two Volvo companies etc. as well as other publication that dealt with automotive matters from the Volvo or from other more public sources).

FOOTNOTE 1: See a conference contribution from 1992 that also is registered and available as o PDF-document at Chalmers Public Library (CPL) (a self-developed method found out together with a junior research competency from the School of Architecture at Chalmers).