1.1 Research background
The pressure of stiff global competition, as well as the socio‐technical advancements, have forced companies to address the requirements of ever‐changing marketplace by acquiring necessary resources and capabilities to sustain their businesses. Because of increased global demand for faster introduction of cheaper and better products, and reduced products’
lifespan, the long term prosperity of companies depends on their ability in new product introduction. From the start of the industrial revolution, when companies for the first time faced the need of developing new products for a particular market, traditional product development processes have been in use, which included the selection of a single design solution during the concept phase, and working on it throughout the entire process. Ever to achieve the ‘better, faster, and cheaper’ goal. Less investment in research and development, changes in customers’ requirements due to technical advancements, adherence to rigorous standards and regulations, and economic crisis are among the main issues in recent years, which reduced innovation, impeded fast project lead times, and obstructed cost effectiveness.
New product development (NPD) could be defined as the transformation process of a market opportunity into a product which satisfies customers’ needs, using a system of interrelated activities (Krishnan and Ulrich, 2001; Martínez León and Farris, 2011). To be able to survive in a fast‐changing market environment companies are always seeking for new ways to increase the performance of their NPD processes in order to increase their profitability, market share and long term competitive advantage (Browning et al., 2002). However, changes in the competitive environment, including globalization, more sophisticated and demanding customers and rapid technological changes, have made it much more difficult.
As the traditional NPD processes are mainly developed for stable markets with long products’
life cycles, they are not capable for making companies competitive by fast and inexpensive introduction of high quality new products (Clark and Fujimoto, 1991). Consequently, firms have responded to these challenges by improving and re‐engineering their new product development processes. New approaches such as Lean Product Development (LPD) have replaced traditional, functional‐based systems to increase the performance of development projects. Lean principles first introduced by Womack et al. (1990) based on the comprehensive study on Japanese car manufacturing companies. Although historically related to the advanced management systems of Toyota in automotive industry, still there is not a common definition of LPD as some researchers even expanded it to include other improvement techniques which could result in faster development of a better product with less effort (Karlsson and Åhlström, 1996; Martínez León and Farris, 2011).
Lean thinking has been the subject of research for more than two decades, where the main focus has been on improving manufacturing processes, as well as administration, management and the supply chain. Nevertheless, there has been comparatively less research done to apply lean to new product development projects, despite the fact that NPD has the greatest influence on the profitability of products. One possible explanation for this could be unstructured and iterative approaches implemented in traditional new product development. As the result, research undertaken to improve NPD using lean principles is instrumental in the progress of engineering projects.
Implementing such new approaches in NPD processes, however, are not as simple as it first appears. The first reason is that LPD is still a new field of research and there is not a possible to find a single accepted definition for it in academic literature. It is due to the fact that lean concept is first introduced in the manufacturing shop floor, and some researchers solely attempt to adopt lean manufacturing tools for the NPD context, in spite of the fundamental differences between two environments. While there are other groups of researchers and practitioners who are trying to define LPD based on best‐practices in NPD, with the focus on Japanese car manufacturing companies, and especially Toyota. In addition to this fact, in general restructuring the NPD processes have some unintended side‐effects (Lyneis and Ford, 2007; Parvan et al., 2015). These side‐effects are the result of high interdependencies between development activities which lead to the higher complexity of NPD projects and increase the role of dynamic effects on project performance (Ford and Sterman, 1998; Lyneis and Ford, 2007). The combined effects of dynamic features, including feedback loops, time delays and nonlinear causal relationships between project components result in project
systems behaving in complex ways which are difficult to be clearly understood and managed by project managers (Ford and Sterman, 1998).
To provide a better understanding about the concept of LOD, and to provide a tool to show the practical effects of lean implementation in the context of new product development projects this research is defined to investigate the dynamics of Lean product development process structure and the way it impacts the project performance. Failure to understanding the impact of dynamic features on project performance results in failure to manage projects effectively, so it is the main step for improving the managers’ mantel models and decision making process to achieve higher project performance. In order to achieve this goal, the focus of the research is first to have a definition of LPD as there is no single agreed‐upon definition in literature, and then to develop and validate a simulation model and to use it to investigate different policies for having higher performance in NPD projects.
1.2 Research aims and objectives
The motivation for this research is three‐folded: first, traditional approaches to NPD could affects the performance of development projects?’ System dynamics modelling is used to make a model of LPD processes at the project level. System dynamics is considered an appropriate tool for this research due to its capability in modelling rework and iteration cycles as the underlying reasons for schedule slippage, cost overrun and quality problems in development projects (Lyneis and Ford, 2007).
The objectives of this research are defined based on the research questions as shown in Table 1. Four research objectives are as followed:
Reviewing lean product development approaches and examining the current state of literature on the subject of LPD
Extracting process‐specific elements and components of LPD from literature
Developing a process model through which the impact of LPD process structure of the performance of development projects can be studied.
Validate and test the model using industrial data.
This research contributes to knowledge by giving a definition for LPD from the process viewpoint and showing how the combination of the process‐specific features of LPD could contribute to the success of NPD projects. It also contributes to practice by helping companies in designing their NPD processes to achieve higher performance. To the best of the author’s knowledge there is no model‐based research which consider the combined impact of LPD process‐specific features on the performance of NPD projects.
1.3 Thesis structure
This thesis comprises of seven chapters which are structured according to the progression of the research conducted. An overview of the contents of these chapters is provided in Table 2. Each chapter starts with an introduction intended to help the reader understand the rationale behind the Chapter organisation. A summary is provided at the end of each chapters to help recap Chapter contents and sum up any salient points.
Table 2: Thesis organization
Chapter 1 Introduction Research background
Research aims and objectives
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