Proposal of a Reference Method for Identification of Wastes in New Product Development Process

Product developers have to constantly innovate and introduce new products to the market. New Product Development (NPD) Process is becoming crucial, and its performances determine the success of the whole enterprise. Different approaches have been implemented in order to improve NPD. In particular, Lean Thinking has been applied with the purpose of improving NPD performances through identifying and eliminating non value adding activities (wastes). Any activity within the NPD process that is not adding a specific value either for external or internal customer can be considered as waste and should be eliminated or minimised as possible. There are many sources and classifications of wastes in NPD that are identified in past researches. The efforts needed now are to identify the nature of each waste, investigate their potential impacts on performances, and discern possible continuous improvement activities to reduce and/or eliminate them at the sources. In fact, it is a mandate to have a clear knowledge, a shared understanding and a deep contextualization of all the wastes that can occur in the NPD process to continually eliminate them and excel in NPD performances. For wastes’ classification, the well-known literature by Ohno (1988), Womack & Jones (1996) has been taken at first, which devises the “7 deadly wastes” in production. However, the natures and sources of production wastes are not the same as of NPD. For that, the Liker’s translation of the production wastes to NPD has been articulated in this paper to consolidate the definition and ontology of waste in NPD. Nonetheless, the waste classifications found in literature are not well investigated in real practical word for their meanings, sources, significances, and impacts. Therefore, in this paper a well-defined and practically oriented library of NPD wastes has been developed with the collaboration of ten manufacturing companies, which develop their products in Italy and across the globe. Furthermore, in literature there is no formalized and structured method to identify wastes and lead designers to improve the process. This paper tries to develop a method to identify process wastes in NPD and further guide for continuous improvements. The proposed method is based on a well-known and prevalent tool called FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis). The proposed method identifies in the NPD process the wastes, the causes (sources) and their effects on performances (Time to market, cost, quality, and innovation). The developed methodology associates to each waste a synthetic index called Priority Index of Intervention (PII). PII constitutes 4 separate indicators; severity, probability, detection and possibility to avoid. And, using PII it is possible to rank the analysed wastes, which can help a company to focus on wastes that are more relevant and need urgent interventions. Finally, corrective actions can be identified in order to reduce or/and eliminate the critical wastes through expert opinions. Project managers and designers from the ten manufacturing companies have been invited to test the validity in practice and to make it suit to industrial needs. It is found out that the developed method: could effectively be integrated in to existing NPD processes, is quick and easy to use, focuses on the real sources of wastes, helps not only to identify the sources but also measure the severity of wastes, it also effectively addresses the possible ways of eliminating or reducing the sources of wastes, and finally it can be used easily not only by project managers but also designers.