Business model development
Maria Alemyr, Julia Wetterstrand · Chalmers Publication Library (Chalmers University of Technology) · 2015
The numbers of electronic control units (ECU) used in products have drastically increased over the past decades, putting high demands on the industry's developers and manufacturers to produce embedded systems that are thoroughly tested.These testing procedures are often time consuming and expensive, which has resulted in the development of hardware-in-theloop (HIL) testing systems which enable testing of ECUs in a non-operational environment with possibilities of full traceability and repeatability of tests.QRTECH has developed a HIL test system for their in-house development and production projects, and want to investigate the possibility of selling their test system as a stand-alone product.Thereby the purpose of this thesis is to investigate what the business model for the tests system should contain in order to commercialize it.Included in the scope are investigations regarding customer segments, changes and modifications to the test system, and how the cost structure should look like.To collect the information needed for meeting the thesis' goal, data collection methods such as interviews, observations and meetings were held.The information was analyzed with the result that the customer segment to target was new development, production and verification projects within the automotive industry.In order to target these customers, the test system must be further developed so that it meets the industry standards of communication, usability, software and model integration, as well as the possibility to provide bug free testing equipment which is up to date.All this, while keeping a low cost profile where customization is a priority.Since customization, i.e., flexibility is key to the value proposition of the business model, a solution where certain features were predefined but most features may be chosen at additional cost was presented as a concept to use when selling the test system to customers.A profit and payback time estimation was made for two cases; commercialization or continuous in-house usage.The result showed a payback time of four years, and a net present value of over 2.5 million SEK at the end of the five year period for the commercialized business model, compared to a little over 1 million SEK net present value and a payback time of three years using the existing business model.This implied that the payback time was a little longer, however the potential to obtain larger profits was higher for a commercialized QTS.Thereby the conclusions were made that a commercialization of QRTECH's HIL Test System would be beneficial to the company and thus recommended.