Abstract
Nowadays, many companies attempt to expand the lean concept from manufacturing to Product Development (PD). However, there are very few practical examples reporting how lean can be successfully applied outside the manufacturing floor. The benefits of lean can only be realized in PD once the concept is scaled to the business environment where it is employed. In this paper, we use a maturity framework for identifying gaps between current lean culture capabilities and those deemed necessary for competitive PD practices in the future. The general objective is to identify differences between companies as to how they assess capability gaps relating to lean within their operational context. A lean assessment framework using a continuous descriptive five-level maturity grid method has been used in the PD environments of nine companies. Focus has been placed on assessing characteristics associated with a lean culture in PD. The results show significant differences between the companies as to how they assess the gap between their current lean cultural capabilities and those deemed necessary in the future. Overall, the use of simple and visual communication means in PD activities is identified to provide the larger capability gap among the companies studied. In the other end of the scale, showing the smaller gap, we identified the perceived role of digital tools and technology in PD.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Womack JP, Jones DT (1996) Lean thinking: banish waste and create wealth in your corporation. Free Press, New York
Ward AC (2007) Lean product and process development. Lean Enterprise Institute, Cambridge
Sobek DK, Smalley A (2008) Understanding A3 thinking, a critical component of Toyota’s PDCA management system. Productivity Press, New York
Karlsson C, Åhlström P (1996) The difficult path to lean product development. J Prod Innov Manag 13:283–294
Haque B, James-Moore M (2004) Applying lean thinking to new product development. J Eng Des 15(1):1–31
Kennedy MN, Harmon K, Minnock E (2008) Ready, set, dominate: implement Toyota’s set based learning for product development. The Oaklea Press, Richmond
Drucker PF (2008) Management. Harper Collins, New York
Browning TR (2006) On customer value and improvements in product development processes. Syst Eng 6:49–61
Reinertsen DG (1997) Managing the design factory. The Free Press, New York
Browning TR, Heath RD (2009) Reconceptualizing the effects of lean on production costs with evidence from the F-22 program. J Oper Manag 27:23–44
Rother M (2010) Toyota Kata—managing people for improvement, adaptiveness and superior performance. McGraw-Hill, New York
Kotter JP (2012) Leading change. Harvard Business Review
Driva H, Pawar KS, Menon U (2000) Measuring product development performance in manufacturing organisations. Int J Prod Econ 63(2):147–159
Welo T, Ringen G (2016) Beyond waste elimination: assessing lean practices in product development. Procedia CIRP 50:179–185
Fraser P, Moultrie J, Gregory M (2002) The use of maturity models/grids as a tool in assessing product development capability. In: IEEE international engineering management conference, Cambridge, UK, pp 244–249
Chiesa V, Coughlan P, Voss CA (1996) Development of a technical innovation audit. J Prod Innovation Manag 13(2):105–136
Nightingale DJ, Mize JH (2002) Development of a lean enterprise transformation maturity model. Inf Knowl Syst Manag 3(1):15–30
Welo T, Ringen G (2018) Investigating organizational knowledge transformation capabilities in Integrated manufacturing and product development companies. Procedia CIRP 70:150–155
Ringen G, Welo T (2015) Knowledge based development practices in systems engineering companies: a comparative study. In: 2015 annual IEEE systems conference (SysCon) proceedings
Acknowledgements
The authors want to acknowledge the Norwegian Research Council for supporting this study through the project KPN VALUE, grant 267768.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Welo, T., Ringen, G., Rossi, M. (2020). Investigating Maturity of Lean Culture in Product Development Teams. In: Rossi, M., Rossini, M., Terzi, S. (eds) Proceedings of the 6th European Lean Educator Conference. ELEC 2019. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41429-0_37
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41429-0_37
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-41428-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-41429-0
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)