بررسی رابطه بین تغییرات عملکرد و بهبود فرآیند در توسعه محصول جدید

This paper reports the findings of a study into the process of new product development. Specifically, it challenges the limitations of the current research into the relationship between the adoption of new tools and techniques and performance improvements in new product development. The study was carried out on a sample of manufacturing firms. Cluster analysis yields a new classification of firms, which is shown to provide a significant explanation of the relationship between levels of tool and technique usage and managers’ perceptions of improvements in outcomes. The existing evaluation of tools and techniques is shown to be deficient in not considering adoption jointly rather than singly. The study shows the benefits of a high level of overall tool and technique usage for improving key competitive objectives in new product development, but with limitations. Significantly, project costs are not improved by a high use of tools and techniques. Improved assessment of tools and techniques should be employed to reduce the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of process improvement.

New Product Development (NPD) is currently receiving the kind of attention that Total Quality Management (TQM) did in the 1980s [1]. Furthermore, there is apparent unanimity in the literature with regard to the potential for firms (in both manufacturing and service sectors) to improve their New Product Development (NPD) processes (see for example [2] and [3]). This agreement is not just in the specialist new product development management literature (e.g. [4]), but includes marketing and strategy (e.g. [5]), economics (e.g. [6]), sociology (e.g. [7]), operations management (e.g. [8]) and purchasing (e.g. [9]). Two observations from contact with firms led to the present study. The first was that despite an almost universal imperative to improve processes, the level of adoption of tools and techniques that would apparently yield improvements was very varied between firms. The second was the apparently poor understanding on the part of managers, of the nature of benefits that process changes would bring. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to determine the pattern of adoption of tools and techniques in firms, and to investigate the nature of the relationship between the tool and technique usage of firms, and the improvements in process performance resulting from these. This is to determine whether the actuality of process changes is consistent with the literature on this subject. The evolution of the fourth generation model of NPD processes is discussed, along with its relevance to modern industrial performance. The weaknesses of current approaches are identified and lead to the research objectives, and a revised approach to this economically vital area of management. The empirical basis of this paper is a study that was conducted across a range of UK manufacturing firms. This was designed to determine the pattern of adoption of tools and techniques and the resulting improvements in NPD processes. Such a finding provides an input into decision-making that will help managers understand which initiatives to undertake and the putative benefits, and guide researchers on how process changes should be assessed in the future. Based on analysis of the responses, a classification of firms is proposed according to their level of tool and technique usage. The paper then discusses the internal and external validity of the classification, and applies it to predict the level of process improvement being obtained by a firm from the adoption of a pattern of tool and technique usage. This improves on previous work, which has largely focused on critical success factors and on individual techniques in isolation, rather than in combination. The overall benefits obtained from the application of tools and techniques are found to deviate from that predicted from the current literature.

As a first step to understanding the usage of tools and techniques within firms, cluster analysis has been used to generate three groups of firms, which can be distinguished by their overall level of usage of the tools and techniques: low, medium and high tool users. This empirical result transcends the limitations of previous research, which merely described the ‘approach’ that a particular firm was taking to the organisation of its processes. This is a more useful classification, as it is based on the practices they follow rather than general statements of intent. The classification was most useful in predicting overall performance improvements. The general pattern is established that the higher the overall level of tool usage, the higher the level of improvement being obtained, though this was not in all aspects of the performance of NPD project or its outcomes — the new product. A high level of tool and technique usage supports performance enhancements in product terms (time to market, product cost and product quality) and in successful application of concurrent engineering. Tool usage does not, however, appear to have any positive impact on development costs, nor does it improve longer-term benefits. All the above leads to the conclusion that the classification has external validity, and provides the researcher with a link between process operational characteristics (as reflected in the tool usage intensity), and the outcomes. Given that all the tools and techniques have been available for use for some time (mostly without any major investment being required) and that their benefits are roundly justified in both the academic and practitioner literature, it would be expected that a higher overall pattern of usage would be seen across all the firms. However, it has been established that managers in NPD processes are not making the best use of the tools and techniques available, despite evidence here that overall patterns (rather than specific tools) lead to improvements. The next stage in this study will be to determine the factors that cause such a variation in take-up. This is vital if research in this area is to contribute to understanding and promoting process improvement. Initial work will be required to determine the nature of the influences on process choice so that a rich contingency model of the relationships can be constructed. This holds out the prospect of more targeted improvement activities, appropriate to the firm and their context at that time, and better related to their own policies, strategies and markets. Moreover, the rhetoric of the process improvement literature could be in line with the reality of the results being achieved across a wider range of firms than is the case at present.