Abstract
International competition, fragmentation of markets with increasingly demanding consumers and novel technologies have strongly contributed to a turbulent and highly competitive scenario of the automobile sector. The characteristics of the market have brought the development of products into he spotlight in this competitive game. Companies have started valuing and demanding more of the evelopment of novel products with the aim to obtain high productivity, high quality short term projects. The current work seeks to identify the contribution of some management techniques and engineering tools to the improvement of the product development (PD) process performance parameters. The main objectives include: (1) to identify the main management techniques and engineering tools that the diesel engine firms of the auto industry present in their PD sector, (2)evaluate the degree at which these methods and techniques are being introduced and (3) identify how the people in charge of the PD sectors sense the contributions of the techniques and tools introduced in order to improve the performance parameters (time, quality and cost). To do this work, eight diesel engine manufaturers in Brazil were investigated. Managers of PD units of those firms answered a questionnaire and indicated that the techniques considered have high degree of utilization, due to its potential to improve performance parameters or to respond to client demands. Managers also indicated that techniques are used mainly in the Product Planning and Product Engineering and Tests phases of the PD process, contributed more to quality than to time and cost parameters, and are better implemented by multinationals subsidiaries with stronger bonds with parent firms.