Design and assembly of differential bevel gears : consequences of in sourcing

Sammanfattning: The electrification of the automotive industry is the largest change in decades of the industry. This fact demands that established actors evaluate their current strategies and develop new competence. The engineering differences between conventional internal combustion engines vehicles and electric vehicles are many and significant. This means that strategies that made sense in past, needs to be reevaluated and recontextualized for today- and future needs. The goal of this case study was to create a basis from a ‘’birds eye view’’ of sourcing decisions for manufacturing companies. This case is designed based on Volvo Cars wishes and thoughts regarding the decision of in-house design and assembly of differential bevel gears. We believe that other manufacturing companies can use this report as a basis when faced with a similar sourcing decision. The basis of the case is qualitative, to get a thorough quantitative result, deeper investigation into engineering valus, economic impact and company-specific factors must be investigated. The study has been conducted in two parts, where the first part gives an understanding of the technical parameters to understand the process of the process of design and assembly of differential bevel gears. The second part examines, with the help of a business case, earlier case studies and compares the case company's situation and contextualize the wants and needs with a resource-based view and summarized through a SWOT-analysis to finally get a quantification with the help of a concept-decision matrix. Based on what the company's wishes were regarding a sourcing decision, a result could be determined in the form of a recommendation to the company. The results showed that insourcing would benefit the company. This is partly due to the fact that they would get cross-functional knowledge and that a collaboration between design and assembly would benefit the final product, the end-customer and therefore the company at large. The results from the concept matrix indicate that the company should choose the insourcing strategy. But there are many parameters to consider. What is not addressed in this report are the economic impact compared to the technical and organizational gains of an insourcing decision, which could be researched in future studies.