IEEE Electrification - March 2022 - 66

finance. Furthermore, the electric
motorcycle industry was not yet
ready because the R&D model
seemed to be a push rather than pull
market production employed by the
existing industries. Therefore, a novel
methodology and approaches for
R&D and production are required. In
terms of technology, business model,
and company, this motorcycle was
novel, meaning it was logical to
implement the innovation-based
approach to research, develop, and
produce the GESITS. Lean start-up methodology governs
the R&D process and was used to develop GESITS
and its business model in less than two years. Subsequently,
GESITS has been mass produced and sold in
Indonesia and abroad with sales significantly increasing
annually. Therefore, this article shows the successful
implementation of the innovation-based concept in
new industries-electrical motorcycles.
The TPS was
implemented to
eliminate the three
factors masking the
efficiency of its
production system.
components, such as the electric
motor and its controller (inverter),
battery pack, and battery management
system (BMS). Moreover, the
business model would also be parallelly
developed with the engineering
activities. Therefore, the rigid motorcycle
development models used by
quality function deployment, the Toyota
manufacturing concept, and V
diagram were unsuitable. Instead, it
required a fast and flexible approach
to address the two challenges of engiIntroduction
According
to several automotive (motorcycle) manufacturers,
it takes 18 months to modify the existing motor and
frame components and seven years to design a new clean
sheet of paper in motorcycle development. Electric motorcycles
are an engineering product. Any engineering product
has to undergo a production process, starting with
engineering activities, product launch, production, revenue
generation, and the final product, commonly known
as the product lifecycle. As reported in many references, the
average duration of motorcycle production lifecycles is
10.6 years before the release of an updated model. Based
on this analysis, the total time available for design engineering
and prototyping is only 5.5 years. This is also the
case for Indonesian motorcycle industries, where many
models and variants only lasted for a maximum of five
years. The total lifecycle of any product engineering keeps
decreasing with technological progress. This phenomenon
also occurred in the automotive sector, where its product
lifecycle in the 1990s was higher by a factor of 1.7 than
those in the 2000s. Therefore, the development of the electric
motorcycle had to be quick due to the shorter product
lifecycle; otherwise, it would be late to enter the target
market. The completion time was set at a maximum of
one year for the engineering design and prototyping, and
another year for testing the prototype. This seems an
ambitious goal because the R&D team had insufficient
knowledge and competencies to deliver the prototype
within two years. The R&D team has acquired knowledge
and know-how on electric vehicles but not in the area of
electric motorcycles. Nevertheless, the team was committed
to delivering the product.
The R&D team faced many challenges in developing
the motorcycle from scratch and its all-main
66
IEEE Electrification Magazine / MARCH 2022
neering design and business model development. The
model to be employed had to guarantee swift delivery of
the results at a minimum cost and parallelly facilitate
business model development. Based on those reasons,
the lean start-up methodology was worth adopting for
the electric motorcycle development. A lean start-up
methodology was initially used in apps' start-up development
in the United States. Therefore, its implementation
in developing the electric motorcycle business was the
first time worldwide and somewhat novel. Furthermore,
the methodology must be tailored to meet the requirements
set by automotive engineering to develop a new
product. Therefore, this article discusses implementing
fast and flexible methodologies, such as a lean start-up in
electric motorcycle development, from engineering and
business model perspectives.
Original Idea of the Lean
Start-Up Methodology
The lean start-up methodology was inspired by Toyota's
Lean Manufacturing processes, known as the Toyota Production
System (TPS). The TPS was implemented to eliminate
the three factors masking the efficiency of its
production system. The factors are overburden (muri),
inconsistency (mura), and waste (muda). Therefore, the TPS
aimed to function effectively and efficiently by incorporating
the following philosophies: tending to the workers'
ideas and knowledge, making smaller batch sizes, implementing
just-in-time production, and accelerating cycle
times. These philosophies heavily influenced the lean
start-up methodology in the sense of minimizing the total
cycle time from idea development, production, and commercialization
of engineering products. This is the true
definition of innovation, namely, to create a product that
has value for society at minimum cost and time. The lean
start-up building blocks contain the planning, building/
prototyping, measuring, and learning stages. Those stages
are called the build-measure-learn cycle and can be
explained as follows. Build-measure-learn is a framework
for establishing and continuously improving the effectiveness
of new products, services, and ideas quickly and costeffectively.
The model creates and tests hypotheses by
building something small for potential customers to try,
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