Lean Product Development in the Healthcare Products Industry: Tools and Techniques for Success and Organizational Effectiveness

Lean product development holds the key to a new age of revolutionary products. It increases the number of quality products, reduces the time to market, reduces the number of problems along the development process and gives a company tools to demand a strong position against its competitors without increasing any budgets or product price. Using the tools and techniques of lean product development to obtain organizational effectiveness is becoming a reccurring issue within the healthcare products industry. This paper aims to identify best practice for the use of the tools and techniques of lean product development within the healthcare products industry. This is achieved through a qualitative case study of a New Zealand healthcare products organization by comparing practitioner findings with literature. The findings from this study outline a framework for lean product development and introduce a new method called the toolbox method. It also provides recommendations for the tools and techniques aimed at New Zealand organisations within this industry.