Copyright: © Ecurie Aix

The successful development of new products is becoming increasingly important due to trends such as globalization or the shortening of average product life cycles. As a result, the share of sales accounted for by new products is rising continuously, and companies are faced with the challenge of developing more new products in shorter periods of time. This pressure to innovate is further intensified by increasing electrification.

Use case from the industry

Every summer term, the practical course "Custom Engineering" offers students a holistic insight into how an idea can be transformed into a "business case" using this method and how an initial demonstrator can be built cost-effectively, in a short time and tailored precisely to customer needs. For this purpose, an application case from industry is used to deepen and apply various methods of product development on the basis of a superordinate project goal.

Through guest lectures, there are continuous links to industry in order to illustrate the interplay between methodological competence and practical application. The processing of the application example in the form of an exemplary product development project takes place under the following, lecture-accompanying premises of "Custom Engineering":

• User-centric: The customer is the focus of product development.
• Agility: The product development project takes place according to the logic of agile product development/Scrum.
• Creativity: Creative work is in harmony with a methodical approach.
• Goal orientation: Waste and additional work are avoided through problem-solving-oriented thinking.
• Return on Engineering (RoE): Higher customer value with simultaneous reduction of industrialization effort and time

The goal of the course is to use the basics from the theory blocks, the requirements of the "use case" and the teaching support in the concept phase to create a complete rough concept to a market-ready product. In the implementation phase, a mock-up in the form of a simple prototype is built on the basis of the rough concept. For this purpose, participating students can use the infrastructure of the PEM – for example the start-up factory. Finally, the event results are presented in the form of a final presentation with an oral examination.

Compact information about the course of the 2022 summer semester is available for download here. In addition, official instructions for the necessary curriculum change are available online. Current dates and further information can be found at the RWTHonline system.