Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 54). / Warranty is an important part of many organizations. Warranty costs take money directly away from corporations' bottom line. General Motors Corporations warranty liability costs its shareholders upwards of billion dollars annually. General Motors currently uses RedX, a systematic design of experiments methodology, to try to reduce warranty costs. Although this approach has reduced warranty costs, it has not done so neither fast nor sufficiently as high costs remains. The General Motors' warranty system was mapped and diagnosed. Interviews were conducted with all involved parties with the warranty system. Competitors warranty systems were compared and contrast to General Motors' warranty system. Other factors considered were new quality methods. The major factors limiting General Motors goals to reducing warranty are time to discover the failure and the time the fix the failure once it is discovered. Another factor is the culture and the lack of team environment within the warranty organization. General Motors should use telematics, onboard diagnostics, signature analysis, and a systemic approach which involves integrating the design and warranty organizations to predict and quickly eliminate defects from its manufacturing facilities. This approach will either eliminate failures quickly or prevent them from even becoming failures in the first place. / by Jelani H. Ellington. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-57). / by David G. Bancroft. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 71). / Climate Change has become a Major issue beginning with our generation. Governments the world over are now recognizing that industry cannot continue to pollute in a business-as-usual manner. Emitting Greenhouse gases has a global impact, unlike pollutants that are released into soil or water. Global warming created by the Greenhouse effect, amongst other things is causing an increase in the ambient global temperature, causing glaciers to melt and global weather patterns to change. At the same time the world population is increasing, the standard of living for an increasing percentage of the population is improving, and with that the global energy usage is going up and up. Currently, a large portion of the global energy is derived from fossil fuels. Combusting fossil fuels are the primary source of Greenhouse gas emissions. The challenge for governments then is two-fold. One is how to cap and/or reduce the Greenhouse gases from industry, and second, how to achieve this first goal without being detrimental to the industry in a large way, or as some say with the least cost. In the USA, due to lack of a federal standard, several states have either banded together or gone it alone, in defining their own attempt to address the Greenhouse gas problem. The state of California is one such state that has put together a committee of experts, to advise the state on how best to design a system with the two afore-said challenges in mind. A model has been put together to model Option A, Program Design 1 of the California Cap-and-Trade system. / (cont.) The goal of the model is to give the regulator an understanding of how by varying the main lever, which is the cap set, the regulator can influence the covered Electric entities in optimally meeting the cap, based on the headroom they have for abatement, and their actual ability to act and the degree to which they can act in abatement; and secondly how this main lever, can create a thriving market for trading allowances, by trying to have almost an equal number of players that want to buy the requisite number of allowances to meet the cap, or sell their excess allowances. / by Chester Fernandes. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-73). / by Shu-Chieh Chang. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 124-126). / by David Anthony Hinton. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-116). / by Rocco Paduano. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, June 2002. / "May 2002." / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 112). / by Jyoti Mukherjee. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 84-98). / Aspects of aircraft product uncertainty during system development are examined. Generation of stakeholder value in lean aerospace product development is linked to the reduction or elimination of project risks and uncertainties in areas such as customer requirements, product performance, and issues that may arise later in the product's life cycle. A commercial aircraft system project is explored as a case study. The system is comprised a numerous subsystems developed by separately managed teams. Teams had different approaches to risk identification and mitigation. The relative success of each team is summarized. A framework for creating value by efficiently and effectively managing uncertainty and mitigating risks during aerospace system development is presented. / by Steven M. Bresnahan. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 71). / Product development in the automotive industry has evolved around the design of components. The organization is established around components and people have a very component centric perspective on problem solving. This has led to local optimization of individual components, while the larger system spirals out of control. The penalty is often measured in terms of development time and cost. New programs are given autonomy to make independent choices without regard for what other programs are doing, which leads to a wide variety of architectures put into place. Program managers and functional managers have different prioritizations. Furthermore, new designs are provided by a separate organization from the group responsible for implementation. They have a very different value system and are unaware of the difficulties experienced in the implementation phase. This type of practice leads to programs nearing production deadlines with poorly optimized systems. Engineers must relearn due to the lack of standardization across program. The team absorbs additional resources from within to fix issues prior to launch. The robbing of resources leads to delays in subsequent programs and the cycle repeats itself. These issues are partly cultural, part organizational, part due to lack of understanding of systems engineering. A new organization is designed, which strengthen the systems perspective and give power to a new role in the organization, the Systems Engineer. The Systems Engineer is chartered with global optimization of the entire system, which includes both functional aspects as well as business aspects like resource availability, development cost and time. They are responsible for developing the complete system, from concept to final implementation. The Design Structure Matrix (DSM) shows the boundaries of the system and reveals new areas where the Systems Engineer can influence the design at lower cost to the organization. / (cont.) The Robustness Checklist, standardization and Systems Architecture provide Systems Engineers tools to change from a component mindset to a systems mindset and to optimize the system as a whole. / by Matthew J. Aquaro. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 138-140). / by Hernan Andres Joglar-Espinosa. / S.M.