to use the old practice of hand building prototypes for the new 7-series project and what should be the direction for prototyping of future projects. One way to make prototype vehicles is to hand build them with highly skilled craftsmen. This process gives the most flexibility towards design changes since the investment is low and the parts are made with non-specific tools. The other method of making prototype vehicles involves making specific tools that are similar to production tooling. This gives the benafit of discovering some possible manufacturing problems in the prototype phase that might otherwise not have been discovered until pilot production.To compete sucesfully in the future market BMWs prototyping activities will require improvement in 2 important aspects while maintaining one overriding priority. First BMW must reduce the amount of time that products spend in development. New features need to be implemented into the products on a move continous basis to keep the company at the forefront of the automotive press. This will involve the making of more frequent prototypes. Second, these prototypes must resemble production cars in both desgn and manufacture. This means using specific tooling for prototypes. The danger of this approach is that the investment associated with the tools for a prototype vehicle will make it difficult for a manager to authorize those last few minor design changes to get the product just right. This is a trap that BMW cannot afford to fall into. The overriding priority of BMWs product development activities must be to maintain the level of refinement that buyers of this marque have come to expect....
