5 NPD PROCESS IMPROVEMENT PROPOSAL
5.5 Implementation of the proposed changes
The proposed changes were chosen because they already have some sort of founding in KONE and thus they are potential candidates to be the first small steps towards leaner product devel-opment. The transmission to lean PD is something that does not happen overnight by imple-menting new tools and processes, but over a long time period and by trial and error. Changes proposed here should not be implemented instantaneously but gradually and only one at the time. As said earlier, product development is the lifeline if a technology oriented company and it should not be endangered by simultaneous big changes.
Reshaping the reviews and establishing oobeya at least on team level can be done with exist-ing resources if sufficient effort is given to the tasks. Also the adoption of knowledge based development can be initialized, but additional resources may be needed to establish a database to gather the data.
During and after the implementation of the changes, the performance of the organization should be carefully observed. The adoption of new tools and processes takes its time, accord-ing to Oosterwal (2010) even years, but nonetheless the observations are needed in order to get feedback on the changes. Every tool can be improved and these are only the initial
proposi-tions as the first lean PD tools. Lean PD is achieved by constantly questioning and improving the methods of working.
6 CONCLUSIONS
6.1 Summary
The aim of the study was to objectively compare the electrical machine development process-es of today by interviewing reprprocess-esentativprocess-es of KONE and four other companiprocess-es. On the base of the interviews a general electrical machine product development process was derived. The processes in all of the companies were rather similar and the derived process description could in fact be used in any of the companies involved in the study.
The management isms and tools utilized by the companies in their electrical machine product development include DFX, Concurrent Engineering, Lean and Six Sigma. Agile methods are not used in the electrical machine development intentionally, but they are rather used in soft-ware development.
It seems that lean product development is finding its way to Finnish electrical machine indus-try, but the implementation is still in process and there are no results available either for, or against, the paradigm. Abroad the paradigm has received a lot of attention due to its success stories, but it has to be borne in mind that the misfired attempts of implementing it rarely get published. Regardless of the polarized publicity, there is a good chance that if lean PD is exe-cuted successfully it will provide a competitive edge for the Finnish electrical machine indus-try.
Three proposals for improving KONE’s PD process were compiled on the base of theoretical research and the practices of the interviewed companies. The proposals included transmission from traditional Design Reviews towards lean Pull-Events that should prove to be more tangi-ble for the management and the stakeholders of the project. This in turn should improve the fluency of the PD projects at the Milestones as the stakeholders are more closely involved with the projects. Adoption of oobeya -management is proposed for creating bidirectional transparency between the product level and the component projects as well as between the de-signers, management and the stakeholders. Knowledge based product development is
pro-posed to address the currently limited organizational learning. Finally a suggestion is made to separate the component development from the current CE matrix to its own sub process to al-low more fluent component development.
Due to the limited time of the study, practical implementation and collecting the results of the changes was left for KONE’s process development organization and the R&D department it-self. Hopefully the proposals made in this study lay the foundation for KONE’s lean PD or at least give some kind of template on which to build on. Development of the PD process should be a never ending task and every tool needs to be proofed in actual organizational environment before its functionality can be evaluated.
In the future the implementation of these proposals will require some organizational effort and development of some new tools might be required. For example a database for storing the data according to the principles of knowledge based product development is needed and the viabil-ity of KONE’s current product data management software for this task should be evaluated.
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