How to measure performance of Lean Product Development implementation efforts?

The need to apply lean thinking to product development is becoming a must for organisations to succeed in the current industry. This paper presents a tool that helps to define the actual status of the organisations in relation to the lean principles. Extensive literature highlighted the need to develop a tool focused on assessing the implementation of lean principles themselves, rather than quantitate metrics. Based on the Balanced Scorecard, four perspectives, with corresponding set of questions, were defined reflecting the enablers of the product development model proposed by the LeanPPD European project. A five-level scale was customised to score the different readiness levels that define the transformation into a full lean implementation. The tool was used to assess the current and desired lean situation of an aerospace company within the research environment and resulted to be accurate in defining the starting condition of the company to adopt leaner practices.

Continuous pressure on product development due to rapid changes in customers’ demands forces companies to seek for more cost effective and time efficient improvements. Lean thinking improvement philosophy is a potential way to be followed in order to enhance the performance of the process of product development. There has been a previous research towards applying lean thinking in product and process development (PPD) by structuring the five core enablers of LeanPPD. Namely, Value Focus; Knowledge-Based Environment; Continuous Improvement; Chief Engineer; and Set- Based Concurrent Engineering (Khan, et al., 2011b). In this paper these enablers set the four perspectives of a LeanPPD Performance Measurement Tool.

It is recommended that before implementing lean thinking in product development there is a needn to measure the readiness of the enterprise in order to adapt lean into the current processes. Thenavailable tools that aim to measure performance are concentrated on financial aspects, and these do notnconsider strategy and improvements, and do not assess the product development processes. Therefore this paper addresses this need by developing a novel tool to measure current product development processes comparing them to the best case lean scenario. Thus this article presents the development of a Lean Product and Process Development Performance Measurement Tool and also discusses one case study within the research environment of an aerospace company.