Facilitate Utilization of Lessons Learned from Previous Product Development into New Development Procedure

Abstract

Due to the medical applications of products of Dynamic Controls and the size of investment that the company has in this industry, the company decided to improve the design and development process by improving its Lessons Leaned (LL) procedure. Based on academic literature and industry guidelines a LL procedure is a process that allows an organisation to take advantage from its successes and failures. An effective LL process should assist the organisation to repeat its successes and prevent the repetition of previous mistakes. Each LL procedure has three fundamentals: “Culture, Process and Tools”. This improvement assists Dynamic Controls to development of products and services to better meet the customer needs, with higher reliability and lesser in-field failures. It also provides more comprehensive design inputs to reduce development cost and time. The objective of this project was to investigate the current LL process in the business, identify the best practice, investigate enabling processes, technologies and tools for taking the most advantages from both upcoming and previous LL, define appropriate categories for LL, and determine an implementation plan for the company. The project started on 1st October 2012 and was delivered by the 8th of February 2013.