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Lean Product Development Effectiveness

其他書名	Managing Tools, Processes and Relationships
出版	University of Michigan, 2010
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=2fqmAQAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋Product development is a competency that is essential to the financial health of firms. To that extent, lean product development is a burgeoning field that has been proposed to improve product development efficiency. In this dissertation we use three independent papers to improve our understanding of the hard and soft issues that enable firms to proliferate lean product development. Our unit of analysis changes from a wide firm level to a narrow project level which aids in triangulation of our observations to ensure depth and reliability. To get a deep understanding we use qualitative empirical methods such as interviews, participant observation and archival examination. Lean product development is categorized by the people, technology and process principles and our study is organized along these lines. Our first paper studies buyer-supplier relationships and its impact on best practice deployment. In our second paper we focus on a PD visualization technology called 3DS. We examine if lean firms are able to achieve better results than traditional firms when deploying the same technology. Finally we examine the process of prototyping and determine the best use of three broad categories of methods. Our study has resulted in both practical and academic contributions. We learned that buyer-supplier relationships can significantly affect best practice deployment. The detrimental oscillation between relationship extremes can be largely explained by the underlying culture of the firms. We also observed that other lean principles such as towering technical competencies and building in learning are essential to supplier management. We then derived a grounded theory model that connected culture to best practices. In our study of technology deployment we observed that firms can achieve a higher level of efficiency if the technology is used as part of a lean system. In this example we show how careful deployment of visualization technology can be exploited by all levels of workers in the organization thus unlocking efficiencies. Finally, our study of the ubiquitous prototyping process uncovered some important considerations. The virtual form of the prototype was found to be specifically advantageous in terms of deploying lean by enabling the use of set based engineering and balancing workload. However, we find that firms will differ in their use of prototype typology depending on product lifecycles. Without adequate scrutiny prototyping could lead to type 1 or type 2 errors. Diligent research design practices such as careful selection of cases and use of triangulation techniques were performed to ensure reliability. Lack of a large sample size is the main limitation of this dissertation.