Towards a Performance Measurement System for Lean-Oriented NPD Processes

Lean thinking has been successfully applied to manufacturing and operations environments and many case studies and research papers have extensively been published. The same remark cannot be made for lean application to the New Product Development (NPD) process. Some efforts in Lean Product Development exist, but, until today, with the tools available, it is impossible to say if a NPD process is lean or not, and actually how much lean is. A kind of gap exists in the applicability of lean into the NPD process and this chapter aims at filling this gap, contributing to NPD performance measurement getting a leanness process. The paper proposes a Performance Measurement System, derived from the Balanced Scorecard approach, for measuring a NPD and its leanness. The proposed framework is under development within the LeanPPD European project

Status of the UCNτ\tau experiment

International audienceThe neutron is the simplest nuclear system that can be used to probe the structure of the weak interaction and search for physics beyond the standard model. Measurements of neutron lifetime and β-decay correlation coefficients with precisions of 0.02% and 0.1%, respectively, would allow for stringent constraints on new physics. The UCNτ experiment uses an asymmetric magneto-gravitational UCN trap with in situ counting of surviving neutrons to measure the neutron lifetime, τn = 877.7s (0.7s)stat (+0.4/−0.2s)sys. We discuss the recent result from UCNτ, the status of ongoing data collection and analysis, and the path toward a 0.25 s measurement of the neutron lifetime with UCNτ

Status of the UCNτ experiment

The neutron is the simplest nuclear system that can be used to probe the structure of the weak interaction and search for physics beyond the standard model. Measurements of neutron lifetime and β-decay correlation coefficients with precisions of 0.02% and 0.1%, respectively, would allow for stringent constraints on new physics. The UCNτ experiment uses an asymmetric magneto-gravitational UCN trap with in situ counting of surviving neutrons to measure the neutron lifetime, τn = 877.7s (0.7s)stat (+0.4/−0.2s)sys. We discuss the recent result from UCNτ, the status of ongoing data collection and analysis, and the path toward a 0.25 s measurement of the neutron lifetime with UCNτ