Towards a paradigm shift in vehicle project management: From a traditional multi-project-management to an integrated process-based digital approach

The automotive industry has to deal with wide-reaching challenges and changes. A continuous gain of significant competitive advantages in a highly competitive market requires automotive manufacturers to produce new products with a large diversity of variants at ever-shorter time intervals. As a result, the frequency of series launches has increased and the need for a sophisticated vehicle project management and an efficient handling of vehicle changes and model updates along the product process have gained significant importance. However, current project management practices and frameworks utilized by automotive manufacturers do not effectively address this demand, e.g., the goals of increasing operational efficiency and productivity as well as establishing continuous improvement are not sufficiently achieved. While these goals are traditionally common-place in certain fields of the automotive manufacturing, e.g., in production, logistics, or warehousing, their dedicated consideration in the vehicle project management or one of its neighboring areas like the vehicle change management has not been examined thoroughly in the required extend. Understanding the determinants of the needed change in the vehicle project management and its related fields is a central objective of the research presented in this paper. In this context, this paper proposes a novel approach on how to manage the transition and why this is a challenge to common project management practices utilized traditionally in the automotive industry.