Article at a glance:

Reducing waste in the auto industry

• North American carmakers and their parts suppliers waste about $10 billion a year as a result of poor planning and faulty coordination.
• An evaluation of 43 product-development programs found that the level of waste was widely varied, and much of it was caused by changes in component specifications and unnecessarily complex part designs.
• Companies with the least waste planned more rigorously when they started to develop new vehicles and so endured fewer design changes, especially last-minute ones.