Successes in lean manufacture have led researchers and practitioners to consider extending 'lean' to different parts of the engineering enterprise, including product and process development (PPD). Lean product development (PD) has been understood to mean lean manufacture applied to PD, while the roots of lean PDjust like lean manufacture-go back to Toyota. This paper presents the methodology adopted in order to pave the way towards a coherent lean PD model that combines lessons from the Toyota PD system (TPDS) with other best practises. The paper provides a unique review of the lean PD research area, and a reference framework for the enablers that Toyota has employed for lean PD. An investigation of five engineering enterprises undertaken to search for evidence of the implementation of lean PD enablers through observation, document analysis and interviews is also presented. Some enablers have been informally applied, while few have been formally implemented, and no model was found to formally combine Lean PD enablers into a coherent whole. This is the first paper to critique attempts to describe lean PD and provide a definition for Lean PD.
Lean practices have been applied by a diverse number of companies in manufacturing during the last decade. Nevertheless, the satisfactory and ongoing trajectory towards an effective application of Lean principles in the New Product Development Process (NPD) is currently under study as it is rather new in industry and the companies still face different challenges to successfully implement them. As a consequence, a novel Maturity Model and assessment tool called SMART has been developed as part of a Lean Transformation Toolkit (Lean 1'2) within the LeanPPD project funded by the European Commission (NMP-2008-214090). This Maturity Model and assessment tool has three main goals: 1) to enable companies to understand which are the main lean practices that are required to achieve a lean product development process and the four perspectives into which these practices are grouped 2) assess which are the companies' curr ent and desired maturity levels in order to develop an action plan for continuous improvement and 3) obtain in a simple and automatic way the results of the assessment highlighting the main opportunity areas. This tool is also meant to follow the company during the Lean Product and Process roadmap, providing the firm the maturity level in each milestone. Therefore, the objective of this paper is twofold, 1) to provide first insights of the successful validation of the SMART Assessment tool in five companies in Spain and 2) to summarize the results of an exploratory study which evidences difficulties and best practices in regards to the implementation of lean practices in product development.
This paper is presenting the conceptual Lean Product and Process Development (LeanPPD) model which is a project funded by the EU-PF7. The project is addressing the needs of European manufacturing companies of a new model that goes beyond lean manufacturing, to ensure the transformation of the enterprise into lean environment. This is a respond to the market demand of value creation, incorporating sustainability and customisation as well as ensuring business growth through the development of high quality products in a cost effective manner at the shortest time. The authors believe that significant change in enterprise performance can be achieved through the adoption of lean thinking throughout the product life cycle. The paper presents the LeanPPD enablers which represent the building block of the model.
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