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The Research & Development Department: who are we?
Research & Development is rooted in Punch Powertrain´s very genes. Spread across the six sites worldwide, around one in four employees of Punch Powertrain is active in R&D. By 2020 a 65 million strategic expansion plan of the department will be completed. The expansion includes the creation of new test centers, test tracks and installation of state-of-the-art equipment and processes. This strong growth ensures that Punch Powertrain will continue to bring innovative transmissions, powertrains and drivetrain systems to the market.
We can divide the R&D department into 5 different blocks:
The first phase starts in Research, Technology & Advanced Development or simply RTAD. RTAD collects, evaluates and researches new technologies and concepts, and develops a selection of these up to proof of concept. They investigate whether a new technology or the innovative concept has a place in our product portfolio. Another important task is to identify potential threats to our current products on time and to make the switch faster than others.
Product Development Groups
When a new technology or concept is approved, we transfer it to our Product Development Groups or PD’s. We have different PD’s for each of our products. Within these PD’s we have several different engineering teams. The System Engineers will do everything to make sure that all parts of the products work together to their maximum performance. They are responsible of the system design. The execution of this system design is done is close collaboration with the experts of the different other engineering teams like Mechanical Engineers, Hydraulical Engineers, Controls Engineers,..
Test Center
When the system design is completed, a validation plan is set up. This means that the products will go to the next phase and also another department, the Test Department. The test engineers will define a set of tests that will be used to check if we reach the needed performance and verify that the product meets all the requirements. They perform tests on our own test track, go to the public road or do test on test rigs.
Application Development
Once the base development and validation of a newly developed product is finished, the further development and updating of this product gets transferred towards Application Development. In the Application Development department, the development projects are handled on a vehicle system level. The priority for Application Engineering and Calibration is to make sure that the combination of the OEM vehicles and our products, adheres to all market specifications and customer requirements. This department consists out of Project Managers, Application Engineers, Calibrators and Test Engineers. Here the whole team will make sure that the project vehicles with our transmission or powertrain will drive and behave like the OEM and the end-customer would like. Our end goal is to make customers happy with our transmission in their car.
Released Products
Once the transmissions are introduced into the market and have reached the mass production stadium, the Released Products department is taking further care of the products. This team is working on a wide variety of tasks in order to support the mass production. This is ranging from new supplier validations up to the more challenging forensic engineering when a transmission is breaking down (or not performing up to the expectations) in the field. Adding to the task list of the team are the production support where we will help our colleagues from production to assure the continuous production of high quality parts and also some incremental design change projects where we will work on improvements which will fit within the boundaries of the mass production limitations.