Lean Product Design and Development Journey

This textbook presents a series of high performance product design (PD) and development best practices that can create or improve a product development organization. In contrast to other books that focus only on Toyota or another individual company applying lean, this book more broadly explains the lean philosophy and includes discussions of systems engineering, design for X (DFX), agile development, integrated product development, and project management. Product design and development can be understood as the product development process (PDP) being carried out in an information-based factory. The goal of the PDP is to create a concept or design for producing a product that reduces risk and uncertainty while gradually developing a new and error-free product, which can then be realized by manufacturing, selling, and delivering it to the customer. PDP is a problem-solving and knowledge-accumulation process, which is based on two pillars: "do the thing right" and "do the right thing". The former guarantees that progress is made and value is added by creating useful information that reduces uncertainty and/or ambiguity. The latter addresses the challenge to produce information at the right time, when it will be most useful. The "Lean Journey" proposed here takes a value-centric approach, where the lean principles are applied to PD allow the choice of tools and methods to emerge from observation of the individual characteristics of each enterprise. Therefore learning Lean Product Development (LPD) is not about learning tools but understanding how to apply the philosophy. The textbook comes with an accompanying manual containing problems and solutions available on Springer Extras.