In today's competitive globalised business environment, production cost cutting is a primary issue before operation managers. As a research area, green lean six sigma (GLS) is proposed to have ...strategic importance in product development towards cutting costs, contributing to optimisation, and achieving sustainability. This research requirement has been realised to draw benefits out of three recent and involved approaches (green, lean and six sigma). In this research, an attempt has been made to address barriers in GLS product development (GLSPD) from an extensive literature review and from experts' opinions towards developing a hierarchical model structuring these barriers. Twenty-one barriers have been identified and sorted from the review of literature and were then validated through discussions with experts. Relationships (contextual in nature) among these barriers have been realised during a brainstorming session. An interpretive structural modelling (ISM) technique has been utilised for developing a hierarchical model of barriers in implementing the GLSPD process in the automobile sector of India. A nine-level structural model has been deduced after application of the ISM technique, which shows 'Competition and Uncertainty' as the topmost output of the model and 'Lack of Total Top Management Commitment' as the bottom-level input to other barriers of the model. Further, MICMAC analysis has been also done to classify these barriers for better understanding; seven barriers are identified as driver barriers, nine as dependent, five barriers as linkage and no barrier as autonomous. An analysis of interdependence and interactions among these barriers may help supply chain managers reach a better understanding of barriers. Thus, managers may be helped in prioritising and managing barriers in order to gain a competitive advantage from GLS concept implementation in product development.
Drastic increases in the scale and complexity of engineered systems present many new challenges for the product development (PD) and engineering design communities. PD is characterized by the ...development of large, multidisciplinary, and networked systems that cannot be embraced by a single group or organization. Appropriate PD management principles can circumvent many of the difficulties that arise during the PD process. In this article, the author presents an integrative literature review that includes theories, models, and tools that can be used to manage complex PD. The review is structured around three PD analysis domains: product, people, and process. The review does not identify all the publications in any one PD domain, but instead addresses critical issues that exist within each domain and at the intersection of these domains. By reviewing these representative papers and creating a critical discussion around them, the intent is to provide an overview of the available theories, models, and tools for PD practitioners, while simultaneously identifying opportunities for future research.
Although the returns of customer participation on new product development (NPD) performance can vary substantially, the current literature lacks a systematic conceptual and empirical integration ...showing when customer participation is valuable in enhancing NPD performance. Building on knowledge management theory, the authors present a conceptual framework that synthesizes a variety of contingency factors. A meta-analysis empirically examines the moderating effects of contextual factors between customer participation and NPD performance. The analysis reveals that involving customers in the ideation and launch stages of NPD improves new product financial performance directly as well as indirectly through acceleration of time to market, whereas customer participation in the development phase slows down time to market, deteriorating new product financial performance. Furthermore, the benefits of customer participation on NPD performance are greater in technologically turbulent NPD projects, in emerging countries, in low-tech industries, for business customers, and for small firms. The authors discuss several theoretical and managerial implications about when to engage customers in the innovation process.
This investigation examines how consumer durable goods producers can leverage virtual reality for new product development. First, the authors develop a prelaunch sales forecasting approach with two ...key features: virtual reality and an extended macro-flow model. To assess its effectiveness, the authors collect data from 631 potential buyers of two real-world innovations. The results reveal that the new approach yields highly accurate prelaunch forecasts across the two field studies: compared with the actual sales data tracked after the product launches, the prediction errors for the aggregated first-year sales are only 1.9% (Study 1a, original prelaunch sales forecast), .0% (Study 1b, forecast with actual advertisement spending), and 20.0% (Study 1b, original prelaunch forecast). Moreover, the average mean absolute percentage error for the monthly sales is only 23% across both studies. Second, to understand the mechanisms of virtual reality, the authors conduct a controlled laboratory experiment. The findings reveal that virtual reality fosters behavioral consistency between participants’ information search, preferences, and buying behavior. Moreover, virtual reality enhances participants’ perceptions related to presence and vividness, but not their perceptions related to alternative theoretical perspectives. Finally, the authors provide recommendations for when and how managers can use virtual reality in new product development.
The Pandemic taught us that accelerated new‐product development is more important than ever, and provided examples of firms developing breakthrough products in record time. Five approaches to ...accelerated development are outlined here: The first two deal with adequately resourcing new‐product projects, namely the use of focused teams; and effective portfolio management to prioritize projects and reallocate resources. Newer digital tools are outlined that speed new‐products developments. Finally, two development methods are described that move development projects faster: Lean development and Agile development. Accelerated development also has hidden costs: undertaking less innovative projects and cutting too many corners. Although important, the topic is under‐researched, and the limited research has yielded inconclusive results about acceleration's expected benefits.
Effective interaction across organisational boundaries is a critical success factor in new product development (NPD). However, few studies have investigated how different mechanisms enable effective ...interaction across organisational and particularly hierarchical boundaries.
This study explores how the formality of the NPD process influences the nature of interactions across different organisational boundaries and specifically identifies interaction mechanisms used across hierarchical boundaries. Cross-sectional interviews were conducted in nine firms. Findings highlight that in firms with a formalised NPD process, interactions tend to have a transactional/managerial bias. In contrast, in firms where the NPD process is flexible, interactions have a more social objective.
The lean product development (LPD) approach uses lean principles and enablers (tools, techniques and practices) to reduce waste and continuously improve the product development processes (PDP). Other ...than reducing product development lead time, LPD also aims at improving quality by reducing problems that might occur during the process. Several LPD enablers are proposed in the existing literature; however, there is limited knowledge on how these enablers may effectively counteract the occurrence of problems in the PDP. We empirically tested the association between 4 groups of LPD enablers and 11 groups of LPD problems in a sample of 64 companies that are undergoing lean implementation in the shop floor and administrative areas. There are two major contributions here. First, we propose an empirically validated instrument for assessing the adoption of LPD enablers and the incidence of LPD problems in companies filling an existing gap in the literature. Second, we provide understanding on how LPD enablers can mitigate the incidence of LPD problems, allowing companies undergoing lean implementation to better manage their PDP. Moreover, some results demonstrate that the association between enablers and problems may not be as suggested in the existing literature.
Research on new product development (NPD) has grown considerably over the last 30 years interweaving with serval fields of study such as strategy, marketing, supply chain management, and project ...management. This article offers an overview of the development of the NPD management literature published over the last ten years (2008 to 2018) in 1226 peer-reviewed articles. By applying bibliometric analysis, we have discovered the existence of five research clusters focused on the following main thematic areas: the NPD process, the integration of diverse knowledge sources for NPD optimization, the relationship between NPD and corporate strategy, the role of users and consumers in the NPD process, and the supplier involvement in the NPD activities. In respect of each area, we selected and reviewed the most relevant contributions and presented the emerging theoretical approaches and best practices. Also, the analysis has helped us to uncover the existence of promising research areas that have been scarcely explored. As a result, we formulated some suggestions for further research to fill in the existing gaps.
Unexpected events and new information during a new product development (NPD) project may require responsiveness regarding development efforts and new decisions about the allocation of financial ...resources. Prior research mainly focused on major decisions about financial resource allocations at predefined milestones; this study zooms in on more frequent and smaller financial resource allocation decisions between formal reviews. This research is based on a case study of a large car company that manages NPD projects with long lead times and large budgets, which are often reviewed and adjusted because of new events that unfold during these projects. We identify an approach for within-project NPD cost compensation at these more frequent and smaller financial resource allocation decisions, which prioritizes the goal of keeping NPD costs in check by requiring teams to compensate NPD cost overruns elsewhere within their project. The study empirically investigates factors associated with the use of this approach, which are based on the need and the feasibility of finding cost compensation. This is particularly relevant for development projects with a high level of uncertainty, which require regular budgetary responsiveness.
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