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

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.

Development and application of lean product development performance measurement tool

The concept of lean product development has attracted the attention of many scholars since its inception in the 1990s derived from practices at Toyota Motor Company. Key to this approach to new product development (NPD) are a few methods derived from lean production as well as longer established practices such as concurrent engineering. This makes one wonder whether lean product development is a new practice, a new method or an encapsulation of already existing methods at the time; this quest for the roots and tenets of lean product development, also in comparison with other methods for NPD, is the focus of this paper. This journey takes this propositional paper not only to the roots of lean product development and the context of its era of conception, but also to what this concept adds to other extant methods for NPD. In particular, this comparison draws out that other methods are trying to achieve the same objectives: the creation of products and services with value to the customer, the reduction of time-to-market and the efficient use of resources. This inference implies that managers of new product (and service) development can choose from a wider pallet of methods and approaches to enhance the performance of RD hence, this paper sets out a research agenda based on the deliberations and gaps that have been uncovered in the discourse.

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Lean Product Development: Nothing New Under the Sun?

Supplier relationships in the automotive industry have changed fundamentally in recent decades owing to trends such as less vertical integration, global sourcing, simultaneous engineering, and the ...

Engineering change management maturity assessment model with lean criteria for automotive supply chain

In this paper, novel method is introduced to establish content driving of engineering model entity definition and generation at computer description and representation of multidisciplinary industrial product system. Main objective of this work was developing new structure of driving content which made construction of requirements, functional, logical, and physical (RFLP) structured product model easier. For this purpose, the formerly developed initiative (I), behavior (B), context (C), and action (A) content structure was restructured and completed into the IBCA+ structure at the Laboratory of Intelligent Engineering Systems, Obuda University. Content entity in its actual definition describes a set contexts which are required to consider at definition and generation of a given RFLP structure entity. Restructuring IBCA for IBCA+ also took connection with entities in intellectual property (IP) organizations into account preparing future main source of content. Multilevel content structure was conceptualized for contextual aspects of IP entity to establish IP driving of IBCA+ structure. Results of work in this paper were aimed at produce new contribution to application developments of RFLP structure enabled industrial engineering modeling systems. Configuration, definition, and programming capabilities are available for this purpose in these systems.

New method for definition of organized driving chains in industrial product model

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

The objective of the research is to examine and develop new methods and tools for management of knowledge in Lean Product development. Lean Product development attempts to apply lean philosophy and principles within product development process. Special emphasis is given to the so-called Set Based Lean Design principles. Such product development process requires innovative methodologies and tools for capturing, reuse and provision of knowledge needed for decision making, as well as advanced ICT environment for Knowledge Management (KM).

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Knowledge Management in Set Based Lean Product Development Process

The objective of this paper is to show the evaluation of a new approach for the management of knowledge in lean product development. For this, a knowledge based environment was developed and implemented within a development department at a large automobile manufacturer. This knowledge based environment captures the knowledge of the designers. When the designer starts a new project, the environment provides this knowledge to the designer to support him in decision making and problem solving. The evaluation gives an insight of the state of product development before and after the implementation of the new approach of the knowledge based environment. The assessment tool and the approach are explained and some results are presented.

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Robert Furian

Papers

Industrial challenges in managing product development knowledge

Knowledge Management in Set Based Lean Product Development Process

Evaluation of a New Concept of a Knowledge based Environment