M. Walton, Strategies for Lean Product Development, Lean Aerospace Initiative, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999.

Introduction

The essence of lean is very simple, but from a research and implementation point of view overwhelming. Lean is the search for perfection through the elimination of waste and the insertion of practices that contribute to reduction in cost and schedule while improving performance of products.

This concept of lean has wide applicability to a large range of processes, people and organizations, from concept design to the factory floor, from the laborer to the upper management, from the customer to the developer. Progress has been made in implementing and raising the awareness of lean practices at the factory floor. However, the level of implementation and education in other areas, like product development, is very low.

The Lean Aerospace Initiative (LAI) has been producing research in support of the military and industry since 1993 on the topic of lean and its benefits. Implementation of the research has been shown to have significant impact and interest. LAI is in a very unique situation at MIT to influence and educate world-class engineering students we have exposure to every day. This research will take advantage of this situation and produce a strategic framework for educating engineers on the front-end lean product development findings that have been produced through LAI. These include topics of understanding the customer and the product value, evaluating multidimensional risk, organizational impact on program performance, and many others.

The research objectives are to: 1) synthesize the findings uncovered by LAI pertaining to non-manufacturing disciplines into a readily usable manner and 2) formulate a strategic approach for educating engineers on the tools and concepts that facilitate early problem synthesis, mission engineering, and front end product development.

Overview

There are six modules into which the LAI product development research has been organized. Module I is used to provide a fundamental framework of lean and its application to product development. Module II identifies the impacts of organizational change on product development. Module III creates a more clear connection between lean and specific process steps in product development. Module IV introduces the research results that have been uncovered in the field of program planning and execution. Module V discusses the external environment relationships to the successful product development execution. Finally Module VI presents the tools and applications that have either been developed significantly researched through LAI.

In each of these modules overviews of the research results can be found. By no means is this an exhaustive text on the research results. The text is used to highlight and direct interest toward certain references. Instead, an exhaustive reference section (with annotation where possible) is included in each of the modules which contains not only research produced though LAI, but also contains research that has been conducted through the Center for Innovation in Product Development which directly pertains to similar topics.