Janaina Mascarenhas Hornos da Costa

Systematization of Recurrent New Product Development Management Problems

Abstract: One of the ways to improve the New Product Development (NPD) process is to eliminate the problems that arise over years of practice. This article describes the systematization of recurrent NPD management problems. The main NPD problems were found to be recurrent; hence, the systematization resulting from this study allows for the identification of NPD areas requiring special attention from both practitioners and researchers. This identification enables researchers to define new areas of academic research, and practitioners to focus on specific improvement projects. Eight case studies were conducted, in which 124 NPD personnel were interviewed, involving the diagnosis of the NPD process and the identification and selection of NPD improvement projects. The diagnostic method applied was the Current Reality Tree (CRT), which is a cognitive method for identifying undesirable effects (problems) in a process. Text mining techniques were then applied to identify similarities among these CRTs. Lastly, NPD categories were created to classify the NPD problems. An analysis of the rate of problems per category underlined the importance of diagnosing the NPD process. It was concluded that process and project management are just as critical as product strategy definition and human resource management. Additionally, we concluded that companies would gain greater benefits by focusing on the aforementioned areas before investing in information and communication technology. Potential pitfalls of NPD may be avoided if companies adopt proactive management actions to mitigate their NPD recurrent problems based on the results presented here.

Improvement of radiology services based on the process management approach

The health sector requires continuous investments to ensure the improvement of products and services from a technological standpoint, the use of new materials, equipment and tools, and the application of process management methods. Methods associated with the process management approach, such as the development of reference models of business processes, can provide significant innovations in the health sector and respond to the current market trend for modern management in this sector (Gunderman et al. (2008) [4]). This article proposes a process model for diagnostic medical X-ray imaging, from which it derives a primary reference model and describes how this information leads to gains in quality and improvements.

BPM for change management: two process diagnosis techniques

Purpose – This paper focuses on organizational change through the business process management approach. While “business process modeling” permits understanding process activities and their activities with other participants, “current reality tree (CRT)” technique promotes the identification of process constraints. The purpose of this study is to compare the results from applying both diagnostic techniques, process modeling, using the business process modeling notation, and root cause analysis, using the CRT. Design/methodology/approach – The comparison is made using a pre-experiment in which two teams conducted diagnoses concomitantly in the information technology management (ITM) process of one unit of the biggest and prestigious higher education institution (HEI) in Brazil. Findings – The modeling technique and the CRT should be considered complementary techniques, since applying one does not diminish or exclude the importance of using the other. Results were compared analyzing which dimensions of the p...

Proposal of a NPD Diagnostic Method to Identify Improvement Opportunities

This paper proposes a cause-effect diagnostic method to aid in the identification of New Product Development (NPD) improvement opportunities, called the Diagile Method. The proposed method is based on the CRT method and incorporates best practices of project management and activities to identify relevant opportunities for improvement. Templates are provided to assist in each phase of the Diagile application and a tool is provided for conducting effective interviews with NPD personnel. The main Diagile outputs are a current reality tree and a personalized portfolio of NPD improvement projects. A controlled experiment involving two independent groups was performed to evaluate the method at a large multinational office supply manufacturer. The results of this research suggest several managerial implications for improving the NPD process. The first is that effective diagnosis plays an important role in improving the NPD process. A cause-effect diagnostic method enables a healthy discussion among multidisciplinary NPD teams seeking to improve NPD to make the right choice of NPD improvement projects. Finally, the company reported that Diagile has proved to be an excellent method to analyze the NPD process and identify its problems.

Knowledge Oriented Process Portal for Continually Improving NPD

Business process management integrated with new product development (NPD) provides practices to help companies to improve their competitiveness. However, few companies know the benefits of these practices and few have the culture of systematically sharing knowledge about these practices to continually improve their NPD. In order to encourage companies to use process management with systematic sharing of knowledge, this paper proposes the development of a knowledge oriented process portal. This portal comprises information related to generic NPD reference models and its continual renewal by using the body of knowledge (BOK), made available by a community of practice (CoP).

A new way to diagnose the new product development process based on recurring current reality trees

The purpose of this paper is to propose and describe a method that uses recurrent problems to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the diagnosis of new product development (NPD) processes and supports the identification of improvement opportunities. The proposed method, called Diagile, is based on recurrent current reality trees (CRTs) and is a new way of building CRTs that includes best project management practices, and the identification and prioritization of improvement opportunities. To support the execution of the method, recurrent problems were identified and a computational tool to aid the diagnosis, a database of improvement opportunities and an automated spreadsheet to prioritize improvement projects were developed.,The proposed method was evaluated through a controlled experiment at a multinational manufacturer of office supplies.,The results achieved confirm that the use of the Diagile method increases the diagnostic efficiency and effectiveness when compared to diagnoses performed by the traditional CRT method.,The validity of the method must be tested on a larger scale, since this work involved only one controlled experiment for this purpose. The experiment involved the participation of postgraduate research assistants, who cannot be considered specialists in the diagnosis of NPD. One could question whether the method will be as helpful for proficient users as well. The authors did not have proficient users available to run the experiment. However, the authors believe that such a specialist would save time in carrying out a diagnosis with Diagile, and also be more effective in validating the diagnosis. However, this assumption could not be tested here and can therefore be considered a limiting factor of the experiment. Nevertheless, the positive results of the evaluations of the companies and users of the two case studies corroborate the statement that the objective of this work was attained.,The greater efficiency and effectiveness provided by the proposed Diagile method was also evident in the identification and prioritization of improvement opportunities. The experimental group drew up a more relevant and coherent list of improvement projects than the control group, and provided documentation for these projects in the form of project charts. The authors believe these results can be of a great impact if implemented by practitioners.,This paper proposes a new way to perform diagnostic of NPD process. In particular, this process is well known to be highly strategic, nevertheless, normally excluded out of improvement initiatives because of its complexity. The diagnostic method proposed is a powerful tool to assist practitioners finding systemic improvement opportunities, expanding the assessment to all dimensions of a business process, e.g. people, technology and process activities.