Benchmark New Product Development Processes Using Dea-based Modularized Approach

Developing new products efficiently complying with resource constraints is a key success factor in today’s marketplace. However, unpredictable incidents occur during new product development (NPD) processes, which often cause resources and schedule overruns. Traditional project management tools lack of efficient and effective methods to solve these problems and challenges. This study applies the data envelopment analysis (DEA) concept to develop a novel project planning and management decision support methodology for NPD that can allocate resources economically and respond unexpected delays dynamically. This paper describes a mobile phone NPD case study to demonstrate the real-world application. In the case study, the proposed approach significantly reduces NPD resource spending on the non-critical activities and optimally allocates the resource on the critical path. The result complies with time, budget and resource constraints and provides project managers solid recommendations for NPD execution improvement within a product portfolio.