Abstract:
Engineering companies must improve their product development performance
in order to meet the challenges of the 21st century where R&D activities are
coming more and more under pressure of productivity demands.
Lean thinking is an improvement philosophy, which focuses on the creation of
customer-defined value and the elimination of waste. The application of lean
techniques to manufacturing and production processes has helped western
engineering companies to stay competitive against their counter-parts from low-
wage countries in the last 20-30 years. However, compared to lean
manufacturing, relatively little research has been conducted in the field of lean
product and process development.
Set-based concurrent engineering is advocated to be one key enabler for lean
product and process development and seemed to be a promising approach to
enhance product development projects with several potential benefits in relation
to conventional approaches.
This research project focuses on synthesizing the good practices of set-based
concurrent engineering within the context of lean product development, formally
embedding certain set-based methodologies into an existing product
development process of a company whilst defining a step-by-step guideline how
to do it. Finally the new transformed development process model shall be
applied in a case study in order to evaluate its practical applicability as well as
the advantages and disadvantages.
After synthesising the good practices of lean product development and set-
based concurrent engineering through an extensive literature review a field
study in the collaborating company has been conducted. With the help of a
developed questionnaire the current practices have been analysed against the
SBCE principles with the goal to identify the challenges and opportunities for
improvements. Considering the results of the field study a new transformed set-
based product development model has been defined guided by a developed
step-by-step transformation methodology. Finally the new transformed product
development process model has been evaluated in a real industrial case study
in order to give an assessment of the practical applicability as well as
advantages and disadvantages of the SBCE approach.
This research provides a practical approach of a step-by-step transformation
methodology to support companies to integrate the SBCE good practices into
their traditional PD model. The transformed product development process
model contains several new aspects that enforce innovation and creativity as
well as decreasing the risk of rework at later stages of the process.