Geração de conhecimento na indústria automotiva: estudo de caso no desenvolvimento de produto

Abstract

The complex automotive product must meet hundreds of requirements to satisfy customers, government regulations, business objectives and needs. The growth in sales volume, competitiveness, growth in product diversification and reduction of the process to “Time-to Market”, resulted in a new business model. New strategies must support an intelligent connection between different fields of work, as well as an understanding of the integration of knowledge from various disciplines. According to Nonaka and Takeuchi, the knowledge creation cycle begins with socialization, where tacit knowledge is converted into explicit. The authors propose four different modes of knowledge conversion illustrated through the SECI model: Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization. In this context, the Social Network Analysis presents itself as a tool to support the understanding of how knowledge can be generated or shared from the interaction of individuals. Thus, the objective of this study is to analyze the process of generating and disseminating knowledge among automotive product development teams, during the simultaneous design of two Upperbody, developed by a OEM. For this, the formal and informal social networks between the departments and professionals involved in the project were mapped, thus making it possible to understand the information flow through the main characteristics of the networks. Then, two metrics were developed to analyze knowledge conversions, namely, Preference and Frequency. The research revealed that the informal interaction of the network presents low density and high index of centralization and divergence in relation to the formal network. Furthermore, regarding the conversion modes, for the Preference metric, the modes with the highest indices were Socialization and Externalization, however, for the Frequency metric, the methods with the highest indices were Socialization and Combination.