Lean engineering standard work In the product development process

This thesis proposes to use an adapted version of ESW (Engineering Standard Work) to develop an assessment that enables identification of opportunity areas for the implementation of ESW in an existing Product Development Organization, by integrating the consistency and quality of the work performed by the engineers, with the additional benefit of introducing lean engineering standardized processes that will help them to work in a more structured and efficient way. The standardization tools would add value to the organization by guiding the engineers throughout the product development process that are designed to minimize process variation introduced by the engineer and to eliminate unnecessary activities. The group of these standardized processes with the integrated Lean Engineering tools is named as LESW (Lean Engineering Standard Work), these would provide support defining crucial steps within a process or provide guidelines for specific characteristics of the product design using the current best practices to follow to complete their jobs. They would be based on firsthand experience and would be updated and validated regularly to incorporate any new data or technological developments. With LESW implemented, the engineers no longer have to work from memory. The process documentation provides a baseline, a standard, which would be referenced by any engineer whether experienced or not, and since the process is documented then it will also help to improve the learning curve of new hired engineers. A gap analysis is performed in order to understand the organization's current status vs. desired status, and then, based on the findings, a new way of working is proposed with the implementation of the best suitable lean engineering techniques applied to a product development organization, including LESW as part of the improvement. All this is done keeping the main target of making the organization more efficient, the process friendlier to the engineer, having a more stable and reliable process that can be duplicated in the entire organization. The management would also be benefitted, by having a better control of the programs, avoid delays and reduce costs by reducing the amount of errors committed by the engineers.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering and Management Program

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Rubio Monroy, Mario Alberto

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Eric Rebentisch.

• Engineering and Management Program.
• System Design and Management Program.
• Engineering Systems Division.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106262

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/106262