The release of new products to the market goes through a process of Research and Development (R&D), manufacturing, and service respectively. Much research has been done on improving manufacturing processes. This research focuses on enhancing current Manufacturing Strategies by making three important and related groups of contributions within R&D and service. The aim of the research was to develop tools and techniques to increase the ‘Fitness” of a company. The first contribution relates to a Fit Development Toolbox (FDT) to identify the interdependencies between the 11 well-known tools of Toyota’s Product Development (PD) system within R&D. Using the proposed FDT a new framework has been developed for implementing Toyota’s PD system more efficiently based on the primary data collected from 112 companies. The second contribution deals with all sources of Unfit demand and how waste affects the flow of processes within R&D. This has been achieved by developing the Fit Flow Index (FFI) using primary data from 322 companies to measure the flow of the PD system at any stage of the project. The proposed index decreases the chances of creating queues and bottlenecks within the PD system which in turn enhances innovation and productivity. The third contribution concentrates on formulating a Fitness index for evaluating quality of services provided by Starbucks after adopting Lean principles. A Fit Customer Satisfaction (FCS) score was calculated using primary data collected from 822 surveys, which in conjunction with the proposed Fitness Index (FI), enables companies to measure their Fitness level in response to applying continuous improvements.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:629818 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Kutbi, Jameel |
| Publisher | Cardiff University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://orca.cf.ac.uk/65836/ |
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