Empirical Study on Outsourcing Factors for Collaborative Product Development in Aircraft Programmes in India

The objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of factors that contributes to the success of engineering and embedded systems outsourcing in complex product development and to develop an outsourcing framework for collaborative product development in aircraft programmes in India. Based on the review of literature on complex product development and strategic outsourcing, the potential factors that determine the product development outsourcing outcome have been identified. The factors are further validated through a qualitative analysis with the experts in the field with more than 20 years of experience. A survey instrument is developed for data collection to validate the model. An exploratory factor analysis has been done on the data collected during the pilot study phase. An important insight from this study is that the technical factors and process factors play a crucial role in determining the outsourcing outcome in the product development in aircraft industry. There is a significant variation in the outcomes depending on the discipline. The implementation factors are more relational in nature with respect to R and D labs / PSUs and are more contractual in nature when it comes to private industries. The study has limitations of looking into the product development outsourcing outcome of only one programme and from the client perspective alone.