Investigating Maturity of Lean Culture in Product Development Teams

Nowadays, many companies attempt to expand the lean concept from manufacturing to Product Development (PD). However, there are very few practical examples reporting how lean can be successfully applied outside the manufacturing floor. The benefits of lean can only be realized in PD once the concept is scaled to the business environment where it is employed. In this paper, we use a maturity framework for identifying gaps between current lean culture capabilities and those deemed necessary for competitive PD practices in the future. The general objective is to identify differences between companies as to how they assess capability gaps relating to lean within their operational context. A lean assessment framework using a continuous descriptive five-level maturity grid method has been used in the PD environments of nine companies. Focus has been placed on assessing characteristics associated with a lean culture in PD. The results show significant differences between the companies as to how they assess the gap between their current lean cultural capabilities and those deemed necessary in the future. Overall, the use of simple and visual communication means in PD activities is identified to provide the larger capability gap among the companies studied. In the other end of the scale, showing the smaller gap, we identified the perceived role of digital tools and technology in PD.