Lean and green approach: An evaluation tool for new product development focused on small and medium enterprises

Abstract

SMEs are crucial for economic health in both high and low-income economies worldwide. In Brazil, they are responsible for around 50% of the national GDP. However, SMEs face considerable barriers such as difficulties in financing international activity, identifying opportunities and making appropriate contacts in their target markets. This paper investigates the adherence of both lean and green practices for the development of new products (NPD), as means to improve their efficiency (lean perspective) and manufacture environment-friendly products (green perspective). Through a systemic review, we present 16 lean and green enablers for NPD operations: 1-continuous improvement, 2-cross-project knowledge transfer, 3-definition of value and value stream, 4-ecodesign tools and green dynamic capabilities, 5-knowledge and learning, 6-life cycle assessment, 7-materials selection, 8-process standardization, 9-product variety management, 10-rapid prototyping, simulating and testing, 11-responsibilitybased planning control, 12-set-based engineering, 13-simultaneous engineering, 14-specialist career path and workload levelling, 15-strong project manager, and 16-supplier integration. These elements comprise a structure of building blocks to evaluate lean and green practices. Thus, we propose a model that ranks the incidence of these practices regardless of the NPD organization level. Using two MCDM tools: AHP and fuzzy-TOPSIS, each enabler is evaluated considering the SMEs context in Brazil. Firstly, AHP defines the relative importance of 14 SMEs´ characteristics. Secondly, we applied an expansion of the TOPSIS technique, adequate when the values of each alternative are not clearly determined. Therefore, we organized a structured interview consisting of 224 evaluations made by the SMEs´ NPD stakeholders. We carried out this diagnosis in three companies from southern Brazil, analysing their NPD operations, which is useful to stablish a future improvement agenda.

Building an OWL Ontology Step By Step for Lean-Based Software Development

“…• Queuing Theory: Optimizes the development time of the processes by assigning tasks based on the waiting time and the appropriate personnel. • Continuous Improvement: Focused on problem-solving, involving people in processes and solving problems present in them, and facilitating the appropriate channels of communication [14,15,17,22,23]. • Testing-Based Development: Based on the repetition of a cycle in short iterations, in which the operability of the different advances of the project is verified.…”

Systemic approach to the new production research challenges

“…Finally, practical knowledge can be drawn from the analysis of financial benefits and the enablers and inhibitors of supply chain finance instruments implementation. Oliveira et al (2018) conducted a systematic literature review along with a proposed leangreen qualitative model for new product development (NPD) operations. The authors investigated the adherence of both lean and green practices in developing new products with respect to a two-way perspective (i.e., lean and green).…”

A Compact Representation of Preferences in Multiple Criteria Optimization Problems

“…There has been a steady-state increase in its usage since its introduction, due to its ease of application. A large body of research concerning with AHP applications in different disciplines can be found in literature including, but not limited to, wastewater services [7], new product development [10], Internet finance [9], sustainable and renewable energy [24,25], water resources management [5,6], agriculture [26], health [8], nuclear power [27], climate change [28], and presidential elections [29].…”

“…On the one hand, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) proposed in [4] introduces relative priority levels and cardinal preferences. A broad range of recent AHP applications can be found in many different disciplines dealing with environmental problems [5][6][7], health [8], finance [9], and product development [10].…”