The 1st Lean Product Development Networking and Learning Forum in Lausanne, Switzerland took place on October 29-31, 2015. This 3-day event brought together lean practitioners from around the world to network, showcase, share their best practices and discuss current and future challenges.
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Organisations are continuously pressured to launch new products and services to gain competitive advantage and satisfy highly demanding global market. And most of this pressure is directed towards product development teams, where majority of organisations still follow traditional or so called stage-gate processes. Although stage-gate process works, it is not flexible enough and tends to constrain creativity and innovation.
LAA, EPFL, Politecnico di Milano and Lean experts from 10 companies successfully concluded the first Lean Best Practices Discovery Project this October in Switzerland. The outcome of this collaboration provides a unique collection of 10 industrial cases, where best practices related to lean product development and innovation are documented and structured in logical chapters.
The Lean Analytics Association (LAA) aims to provide state of the art research about the latest trends in lean innovation. On Friday March 6 2015, LAA organized the Best Practices Discovery project kick-off meeting in Lausanne in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and Politecnico di Milano. Ten companies from different sectors and countries joined the project to collaboratively share their best practices and lessons learnt.
One of the tools developed and validated during the LeanPPD project was the SMART Maturity Assessment which enables companies to identify their readiness and maturity level applying best practices towards a lean product development process.
The Lean Analytics Association (LAA), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) and Cranfield University organized an Industrial Workshop on September 3, 2013 in Lausanne, Switzerland. LAA aims, as part of its mission statement, to collaborate with companies, universities, consulting firms, other associations and lean experts to co-develop, train, implement and diffuse best practices applying lean thinking in product development. This Industrial Workshop provided a good occasion for participants to network, share their experiences and learn from each other.
Lean manufacturing was first used by Toyota in Japan during the mid-1950s when they introduced new ways to eliminate muda (Japanese for waste) in their manufacturing process. Since then, Lean manufacturing has focused on increasing productivity by reducing waste eliminating non value added activities. It was diffused worldwide in 1990s after the publication of “The Machine that changed the world” where Womack, Jones and Roos formally described the Toyota model as a faster,more efficient and thus more profitable production system than the traditional known by the western world.
