ENSURING RELIABILITY IN LEAN NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Many companies have begun their lean journey. This typically begins on the shop floor with lean manufacturing methods. This soon leads to applying lean to other processes including new product development. Lean New Product Development (Lean NPD) creates value and eliminates waste by creating knowledge up front to enable informed design decisions and eliminate rework loops. From a quality and reliability perspective, this should be viewed positively because it offers the opportunity to do what is needed up front to ensure robust and reliable products. This paper provides an introduction to Lean NPD and shows how it can be applied to reliability needs definition, design decisions, risk assessment and mitigation, critical characteristics and process control, product testing, failure analysis and corrective action to improve product reliability and robustness. Lean product development changes the focus of how design and development are done, and reliability and robustness tasks are part of the up front knowledge development that facilitates better decisions to get the product right the first time and eliminate the waste of rework and repeated development loops.