1Research Scholar, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Government College of Engineering, Aurangabad - 431005, India
2National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Vihar Lake, Powai Mumbai-400087, India
*Corresponding author Email: nitin.bhalkikar@gmail.com
Online published on 26 March, 2015.
Some automotive SMEs in India have been adopting TPM, TQM, and other Lean concepts to improve competitiveness. Concurrent engineering enables collaborations across different functions to improve competitive performance using product data management and product lifecycle management tools. Collaboration is about sharing data, information and knowledge. Often PDM/PLM tools are out of reach for SMEs due to high costs and expertise. However, simple team based collaborative approach can also help to practice concurrent engineering to improve the competitiveness in SMEs. This work explores collaborative practices in select automotive SMEs and its impact on the performance. Five automotive SMEs from Aurangabad auto cluster region have been selected for the study. The perceived benefits of the collaborative practices have been measured through key performance measures. Multi-criteria methodology has been used to evaluate the overall performance of SMEs. The approach can be easily used by the practitioners to benchmark the performance for further improvement.
Automotive SMEs, Benchmark, Collaborations, Collaborative practices, Competitiveness, Multi-criteria, Performance
