Development of a Conceptual Framework for Lean New Product Development Process

Traditional product development processes have inherent weaknesses and take a lot of time. On an average, it takes around 3–4 years for organisations to come up with a new product. According to the A.T. Kearney study, around 50% of the costs incurred in product development tend to be spent on wastes that occur during the New Product Development (NPD) process. In recent years organisations have seen great strides in improving their competitive position through wastes reduction by reorienting their manufacturing around the Lean Manufacturing (LM) philosophy. A literature review revealed that researchers have started applying LM principles to the NPD process, which they call as 'Lean New Product Development (LNPD)' and are inundating the literature with topics like wastes in NPD process, tools and techniques for LNPD, barriers in achieving LNPD etc. But no literature is available to provide a step by step approach in the form of a systematic framework to make the existing NPD process leaner. Hence in this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a conceptual framework, which will provide necessary guidelines for the organisations to make their NPD process leaner. A case study has been discussed in support of the proposed framework.