Beyond Waste Elimination: Assessing Lean Practices in Product Development

Maintaining simultaneous focus on efficiency and effectiveness is a difficult yet necessary strategy to deliver commercially viable products in today's global world of competition. As a result, manufacturing companies aim to shift from a modus of operandi dominated by removing waste at the factory floor to leveraging value creation in all direct or indirect activities within the product value stream. One of the most popular strategies in this regard is to apply the Lean concept in product development (PD). This paper researches to which degree PD practices in a Scandinavian design and manufacturing company comply with Lean in its own context. A capability maturity tool has been developed and piloted in the case company to identify gaps and improvement potentials. The results show that the structure of the tool makes it scalable to other contexts than the case company.