Gestão de desenvolvimento de produtos na indústria de máquinas e implementos agrícolas: estudo de casos em empresas nacionais de grande porte

Abstract

The industry of Agricultural Implements and Machines has had an expressive development in the country, following the expansion of the Brazilian agro-industrial area and focusing in the exportation increase of the agricultural products as alternative to reach a better distributed invoicing throughout the year, being tried to overlap the problems of the internal seasonality. It demands from the national companies a quality improvement of the projects and manufacture of these products, adjusting them to international standards of performance and to the trend of homologation requirements of the new products. This improvement passes for a revision and adequacy of the product development process management in the sector s national companies. This work presents a research about the practices and problems of the management of the process development of the agricultural products from five national companies located in the Sao Paulo state. For the data collecting, it was used an interview script, which was applied to the person in charge of the PPD. It was observed a heterogeneous vision of the purpose of the PPD in the five national companies studied. There are some companies that see the PPD as an essential set of project activity of the product. The others companies, however, face the PPD as a market research of the launching of the new product. Often the activities of the PPD are practical and empirical: researching the physical prototype and specifying the project (using software like CAD). For this reason, the use of supporting tools for the product development contributes for a better quality of the project and for a better management of the product