Identifying Lean thinking measurement needs and trends in product development: Evidence from the Life Sciences sector in Switzerland

Measuring the implementation of Lean principles constitutes a major challenge for many organizations. Several frameworks and tools have been developed and proposed, but no one has shown full success to specifically focus on measuring lean in the product development process. In order to fulfill this opportunity, one of the results of the LeanPPD FP7 project funded by the European Commission, is to develop a self-assessment tool to enable companies to assess their maturity and readiness for Lean implementation and guide them through the implementation process with both qualitative and quantitative measures. In parallel to the tool development, an exploratory research was carried out to understand the current practices and tools firms use to measure their lean implementation and to identify their needs. Therefore, this paper aims to diffuse the findings of how companies are measuring the progress of Lean thinking implementation into their product development. The data was gathered from five highly innovative companies from the Life Sciences sector located in Switzerland. © 2010 Springer-Verlag London Limited.