Rover Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of BMW, is the U.K.'s largest vehicle manufacturer. Its product range includes the world famous Land Rover, Rover, and MG marques.
Rover Power Train Engineering (RPTE) is the division responsible for designing and developing Rover's power units and transmissions. One of its projects has been a design study investigating the reduction of fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions as a medium-term efficiency improvement action for the cylinder heads of Rover's award winning, lightweight K-Series engine range. The team looking into the concept study called the project "Osprey". It was also a multifunctional team drawing from a variety of departments with most of its members also involved in other types of projects.
A design specification was settled early in the project's life and a program of work commenced. However, changing circumstances and personnel forced a review of the project status as other cylinder head options open for fuel and carbon dioxide reduction. After a brainstorming session, the output information proved the technology selection task to be quite daunting. As Bill Rouse had recently visited Rover, it seemed like a good idea to "hang" this output data on the Product Planning Advisor to see just what resulted, both as a help to Osprey team and as a pilot test of the usefulness of the software.
The Osprey team held meetings to tailor the data to the Product Planning Advisor, obtaining data from other stakeholders where necessary. The results of this exercise were quite surprising in that the highest utility solution was an option not considered prior to the brainstorming. It was also a solution that conflicted with RPTE's established multi-valve culture. Moreover, the original project specification resulted in an estimated utility much lower in the rank ordering of solutions than expected. Upon interrogation, despite alterations to the input data, the output rank ordering did not change. However, the team made the choice to proceed with the second place solution as the first place solution was more visionary than originally recognized, and therefore would find its place in one of RPTE's longer term projects. It was also reassuring to learn that the ultimate choice had much higher utility than the alternative of taking no action.
The major benefits of using the Product Planning Advisor were: