How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

* Starting from Need* Evolution of the Toyota Production System* Further Development* Genealogy of the Toyota Production System* The True Intention of the Ford System* Surviving the Low-Growth Period

Toyota production system : beyond large-scale production

Lean information management: Understanding and eliminating waste

Value stream mapping to reduce the lead-time of a product development process

Many models of the design and development process have been published over the years, representing it for different purposes and from different points of view. This article contributes an organising framework that clarifies the topology of the literature on these models and thereby relates the main perspectives that have been developed. The main categories of model are introduced. Their contexts, advantages, and limitations are considered through discussion of selected examples. It is demonstrated that the framework integrates coverage of earlier reviews and as such provides a new perspective on the literature. Finally, key characteristics of design and development process models are discussed considering their applications in practice, and opportunities for further research are suggested. Overall, the article should aid researchers in positioning new models and new modelling approaches in relation to state-of-the-art. It may also be of interest to practitioners and educators seeking an overview of developments in this area.

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Process models in design and development

Lean Thinking and its principles as prescribed by Womack and Jones have been successfully applied to manufacturing and operations environments, and associated case studies and research literature have been published extensively. The same cannot be said for Lean application to the new product introduction (NPI) or development processes. The aim of this paper is to describe the application of the Womack and Jones principles of Lean Thinking to the NPI process (from concept development to detailed design through to customer delivery). While techniques such as concurrent engineering (or concurrent product development) have been implemented and have been quite successful in improving NPI, there is still a shortfall in the expected or desired improvements to NPI. This shortfall we believe can be bridged through the application of Lean Thinking to NPI; in particular, the five lean principles proposed by Womack and Jones. The five Lean principles are briefly ‘specify value’, ‘identify the value stream and elimina...

Applying lean thinking to new product introduction

Successes in lean manufacture have led researchers and practitioners to consider extending ‘lean’ to different parts of the engineering enterprise, including product and process development PPD. Lean product development PD has been understood to mean lean manufacture applied to PD, while the roots of lean PD – just like lean manufacture – go back to Toyota. This article presents the methodology adopted in order to pave the way towards a coherent lean PD model that combines lessons from the Toyota product development system TPDS with other best practises. The article provides a unique review of the lean PD research area, and a reference framework for the enablers that Toyota has employed for lean PD. An investigation of five engineering enterprises undertaken to search for evidence of the implementation of lean PD enablers through observation, document analysis and interviews is also presented. Some enablers have been informally applied, while few have been formally implemented, and no model was found to formally combine lean PD enablers into a coherent whole. This is the first article to critique attempts to describe lean PD and provide a definition for Lean PD.

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Towards lean product and process development

This article presents a transformation process towards lean product development in an aerospace industry. This transformation was achieved in two main stages: the first was to integrate the principles of set-based concurrent engineering into an existing product development model of an aerospace company. This stage included defining activities and associated tools. The second stage was to implement the developed model in a research-based industrial case study, a helicopter engine in this case. Three main outcomes were realised from this work. First, it presented an industrial case of lean transformation in product development, where the leanness of an existing model was enhanced by embedding set-based concurrent engineering principles. Second, the developed model was structured into a set of well-defined activities and associated tools that were previously scattered or redundant. Finally, the developed model was trialled in an industrial project of a helicopter engine, tested to evaluate its value in enhan...

The transformation of product development process into lean environment using set-based concurrent engineering: A case study from an aerospace industry:

To systematically create and share product development knowledge creates challenges for engineering companies. This paper presents an extensive study regarding the process of identifying such challenges in managing product development knowledge from the perspective of designers and engineers. This research is part of the LeanPPD, a project funded by the EU-PF7 (www.leanppd.eu), to address the need of European manufacturing companies for a new model, which extends beyond lean manufacturing and incorporates lean thinking into the product design and development process. A rigorous research methodology has been employed, which included the use of questionnaires and focused interviews with key informants from industry, involving forty-two product development engineers from nine different companies. The most significant concerns raised during the study concerned knowledge life cycle activities, product development environment and management. Thirty-eight challenges were identified, classified and discussed in order to provide the knowledge management community with practical evidence, and also to inform future research directions in managing product development knowledge.

Industrial challenges in managing product development knowledge

Design of complex aerospace products and their manufacturing processes requires the creation of many different computer models representing the designs, at varying levels of fidelity, for multiple engineering domain analyses/simulations. Multiple disparate computational technologies are used in the process. In order to reduce lead-times and enable rapid design search and optimisation, engineers spend significant resources and time automating the creation of geometry and finite element models, integrating these models, and auto executing the various engineering codes. This paper presents a 'common computational' approach to address the challenges of automation and integration and discusses its benefits over traditional approaches.

Badr Haque

Papers

Applying lean thinking to new product introduction

Towards lean product and process development

The transformation of product development process into lean environment using set-based concurrent engineering: A case study from an aerospace industry:

Industrial challenges in managing product development knowledge

Overcoming the challenges of automating and integrating virtual product development processes