Improving project planning through cost rescheduling: Pininfarina SpA case study

Project Management, as it is understood today, was established no later than fifty years ago, in the early 1960s, when companies began to appreciate the benefits of organized project work and to understand how important it was to coordinate departments to achieve a common goal. Nowadays, Project Management is applied in all companies, in the form of its three fundamental approaches, Waterfall, Agile and Hybrid, which have become a fundamental tool for completing a project while respecting deadlines, costs and maintaining quality to desired standards. For this thesis work, a predominantly Waterfall methodology was followed, with distinct phases in which each phase begins only after the previous one is complete. The project is tracked through a fundamental tool available to the project manager, the project schedule, which allows for resource allocation, identification of critical paths, and ensuring that the project stays on track. In the following thesis work, the production process of a complex automotive project present at Pininfarina S.p.A., a drivable vehicle, is analysed following the project scheduling. The analysis is conducted to identify an experimental and automated methodology for cost re-planning, which can improve the company's process of allocating the value of monthly production. The first chapter of this thesis provides an overview of the Pininfarina company, a leading Italian design and engineering firm specializing in luxury automobiles, industrial design, architecture, and transportation. Pininfarina has a rich heritage of designing some of the world's most iconic cars for brands such as Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, and Maserati. The second chapter introduces the topic of Project Management, to better understand its functioning and how it was essential for this project to identify the company's problem and the desired output. The path followed to arrive from a raw frame to a drivable vehicle is also discussed, considering the buy and make choices previously made by the company. This chapter highlights difficulties, mainly in the relationship with suppliers, and challenges of allocating costs month by month, which will be the starting point for the implementation of an automated cost re-planning process. The third chapter, having understood the company's needs, introduces the process followed to create a tool that reschedule costs not incurred in previous months by adjusting future forecasts. The tool, an Excel workbook programmed in Visual Basic Application (VBA), is described in detail, to understand why VBA was chosen, the idea behind implementing procedures, and how the user interfaces with it to achieve the desired results. The fourth chapter of this thesis explains the obtained results and how they are decisive in establishing specific patterns of seasonality for each supplier, as well as the analysis of the results obtained and possible future implementations.