Engineering and Design Best Practices in New Product Development: an Empirical Research

Nowadays companies are subject to pressuring and challenging calls for innovation. New Product Development (NPD) becomes a crucial function for competitiveness, survival and prosperity. In order to deliver products successfully, companies can choose between a vast amount of best practices to apply in their innovation processes. This paper proposes a classification framework of prevalent NPD best practices obtained through literature investigation and focus groups with experts. Moreover, this study presents a research conducted in 2012 and 2013 across 103 companies based in Italy, with the aim to understand the level of implementation of the proposed framework of NPD best practices. Finally, starting from the analysis of the collected data, the paper contributes to the ongoing debate about the contingency of best practices: since one size doesn’t fit all, is it correct to talk about best practices in general or should we start considering them context dependent? Data demonstrates that moving research towards this direction makes definitely sense

Set Based Engineering and Eco-efficient design selection at conceptual phase of product design and development process

Growing concerns regarding the environmental impact of industrial activities, coupled with consumer demands for environmentally sound products, have forced manufacturers to scrutinize carefully the environmental friendliness and economical prosperity of their products during the design process; a domain called eco-efficient product design. To design an eco-efficient product, related requirements must be considered during the conceptual design phase, where the cost of incorporating changes is relatively low, and different feasible concepts of the product should be evaluated as such. However, at this early design stage, life cycle data and information are subject to severe uncertainties that make the selection of the most favourable eco-efficient product concept arbitrary based on incomplete information and knowledge. In this paper it is rationalised Set Based Engineering (SBE), Toyota way of conceptual product design, to be used early in a design process, premising elimination of inferior designs and subsequently delaying the selection of the best eco-efficient design till sufficient information and knowledge being acquired to do so

Engineering and Design Best Practices in New Product Development: an Empirical Research

Nowadays companies are subject to pressuring and challenging calls for innovation. New Product Development (NPD) becomes a crucial function for competitiveness, survival and prosperity. In order to deliver products successfully, companies can choose between a vast amount of best practices to apply in their innovation processes. This paper proposes a classification framework of prevalent NPD best practices obtained through literature investigation and focus groups with experts. Moreover, this study presents a research conducted in 2012 and 2013 across 103 companies based in Italy, with the aim to understand the level of implementation of the proposed framework of NPD best practices. Finally, starting from the analysis of the collected data, the paper contributes to the ongoing debate about the contingency of best practices: since one size doesn’t fit all, is it correct to talk about best practices in general or should we start considering them context dependent? Data demonstrates that moving research towards this direction makes definitely sense

Proposal of a Reference Sustainability Framework

Since several years, the word sustainability has earned relevance within different backgrounds, with its meaning dominantly related to environmental and social issues. In fact, environmental changes and a higher awareness about social issues and poverty moved international institutions and different countries to take strategic care of sustainability. Because of its increasing importance, several definitions have been proposed, in order to define specifically its meaning and to address its main dimensions. This work aims at better understanding the actual state of sustainability practices within industrial companies. To pursue this, an explorative research has been implemented through the use of a questionnaire, responded by 20 companies. Afterwards, all the results have been analyzed and classified in a Reference Sustainability Framework

Compact Teams: a Model to Achieve Lean in Product Development

Lean thinking has been applied with the purpose of improving product development (PD) performances by eliminating non-value adding activities (wastes) and creating flow. However, companies are struggling to realize Lean PD in practice and leverage on its principles to improve performances. The paper aims to introduce a model called compact teams (CTs). It is deduced from a real case company that has obtained significant improvements in implementing it. The case is an Italian company named Carel Industries (www.carel.com), which designs and produces products in Heating, Ventilation, Air-conditioner and Refrigeration (HVAC/R) markets. Brief literature reviews are made on the lean principles and wastes in PD. Moreover, the paper presents the performance benefits of the model that are obtained in the case company