The application of an assessment tool for lean product development: An exploratory study in Spanish Companies

Lean practices have been applied by a diverse number of companies in manufacturing during the last decade. Nevertheless, the satisfactory and ongoing trajectory towards an effective application of Lean principles in the New Product Development Process (NPD) is currently under study as it is rather new in industry and the companies still face different challenges to successfully implement them. As a consequence, a novel Maturity Model and assessment tool called SMART has been developed as part of a Lean Transformation Toolkit (Lean T2) within the LeanPPD project funded by the European Commission (NMP-2008-214090). This Maturity Model and assessment tool has three main goals: 1) to enable companies to understand which are the main lean practices that are required to achieve a lean product development process and the four perspectives into which these practices are grouped 2) assess which are the companies' current and desired maturity levels in order to develop an action plan for continuous improvement and 3) obtain in a simple and automatic way the results of the assessment highlighting the main opportunity areas. This tool is also meant to follow the company during the Lean Product and Process roadmap, providing the firm the maturity level in each milestone. Therefore, the objective of this paper is twofold, 1) to provide first insights of the successful validation of the SMART Assessment tool in five companies in Spain and 2) to summarize the results of an exploratory study which evidences difficulties and best practices in regards to the implementation of lean practices in product development.