Stefan Breunig

Systematic waste elimination in lean product development using generic activities

In the context of lean product development, the Value Stream Analysis (VSA) has proven to be an effective approach for the elimination of waste in product development processes. While this method focuses on the detection of waste by analysing the dependencies and interaction of activities in the development processes, the execution of the activities themselves is not further examined, although a great potential for the elimination of waste within activities can be identified. This paper introduces a new approach to analyse the execution of product development activities and eliminate waste. Generic activity types within the development processes are derived and their ideal and lean execution is defined. To utilise the generic activities for the optimisation of product development activities, a specific procedure applicable within a VSA is presented.

Identification of variant-creating factors in product service systems

Nowadays, providing purchasable goods is not enough for a company to survive on the global market. Because of competitive prices and a large range of products available, companies need to offer additional benefits to their customers in order to create a unique selling point. They add services to their product portfolio and offer clients the opportunity to acquire an additional service solution to go with it. The offered services need to fit to the customers needs, resulting in a variety of available services, great complexity of the service range and decreasing transparency of the resource utilization. This paper addresses the problem by identifying variant-creating factors in product service systems, transferring them into an organizational framework and verifying their significance.

Characterization and empirical analysis of variety-induced costs in integrated product-service systems (PSS)

In this paper a framework for the categorization of cost drivers in product-service systems is presented. Cost drivers were derived in a literature research and allocated to the corresponding categories within the product or service domain. The significance of the identified cost drivers was validated by an empirical study analyzing the impact of cost drivers on the organization. The study particularly focused on companies providing a portfolio that was combined by products and services. Moreover, companies were grouped into companies providing a product-dominated portfolio, a service-dominated portfolio and a balanced portfolio of products and services with equal importance. The results indicate that variety-induced costs for products predominantly occur in activities in Sales, Engineering and Quality Assurance, while service provision, for instance, is affected by short-term changes and coordination efforts.