A tool to measure the performance of Lean Product Development

The need of applying lean thinking to product development is becoming a must for the organisations to succeed in the current industry. This paper presents the development and application of a tool that helps to identify the actual status of the organisation in relation to the lean principles. Overview of the literature highlighted the need of developing a tool focused on assessing the implementation of lean principles themselves, rather than quantitative metrics. Based on the idea of the balanced scorecard, four perspectives, with their corresponding set of questions, were defined reflecting the enablers of the lean product development model proposed by the Lean Product and Process Development European project. A five-level scale was customised to reflect different readiness levels of lean implementation. The tool was used in case studies in two organisations; first in aerospace and second in automotive. Examples of measurement from two different organisations demonstrated the accuracy of the tool in assessing and defining the starting conditions for adapting lean principles and practices.

Companies are under continuous process to deliver highquality products cheaper and faster. This motivates them to pursue more cost-effective and time-efficient methods and technologies. For decades, researchers have focused on defining principles and practices to increase effectiveness and efficiency of product development (PD). Among different PD approaches, lean product development (lean PD) was introduced in the early 1990s based on Toyota’s Product Development System, enabling Toyota to become the world’s leading car manufacturer (Womack, Jones, and Roos 1990). Toyota PD focuses on three elements: value, knowledge and improvement. Reviews of research progress in lean PD during the past two decades can be found in the literature (León and Farris, 2011; Khan et al. 2013; Hoppmann et al. 2011). As part of the Lean Product and Process Development (LeanPPD) European project (FP7/NMP-2008–214090), a new model based on lean thinking was developed, which considers the entire product life cycle. The LeanPPD model shown in Figure 1 consists of five key enablers: value, knowledge (or learning), continuous improvement, chief engineer and set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE), which is the core enabler (Khan 2012; Al-Ashaab et al. 2013). It is recommended to measure the initial leanness of the enterprise and their desired level of employment of lean practices before the actual implementation of lean thinking in PD. The available tools that aim to measure performance are concentrated on financial aspects, and these do not consider strategy and improvements, and do not assess the PD processes (see Sections 3.1 and 3.2). Therefore, to address this need, a novel tool to measure current PD processes and compare them to the lean best-case scenario has been developed. This paper presents the development of a lean PD performance measurement tool, which uses the LeanPPD enablers as the foundation for the four perspectives used in the tool.

This paper also discusses two research-based case studies of its implementation in the aerospace and automotive sector as a proof-of-concept demonstrator. The paper is structured with an overview of lean PD in Section 2, followed by the review of performance measurement methods in PD in Section 3. The development of the lean PD performance measurement tool is described in Section 4, and two performance measurement case studies are described in Section 5. The paper concludes with a discussion and future work in Section 6.