In order to face their global competitors, one solution consists for manufacturing companies around the world to implement the Toyota Production System (TPS). Lean manufacturing evolved from TPS. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that lean principles and concepts can be successfully applied in a company from the retail industry, such as Seven-Eleven Japan. Lean retailing is now a reali...

Action Design Research (ADR) has been termed a new research method for generating prescriptive design knowledge through building and evaluating ensemble IT artifacts in an organizational setting. This paper demonstrates the use of the ADR methodology in a New Software Product Development (NSPD) environment. The main argument of this paper is to investigate whether ADR facilitates engaged schola...

In this paper an innovative approach is presented, which enables modeling and exchanging information about the uncertainty of product properties along the product life cycle providing improvement for product development. A system which is called “COPE” (Collaborative Ontology-based Property Engineering System) is proposed, which uses the advantages of an ontologybased approach. The proposed sys...

There is significant interest in managing IT resources as a portfolio of assets. The concept of IT portfolio management (ITPM) is relatively new, compared to portfolio management in the context of finance, new product development (NPD), and research and development (R&D). This article compares ITPM with other types of portfolio management, and develops an improved understanding of IT assets and...

A growing number of companies are using these approaches in helping to synthesize designs ... enabling the automaker to achieve a 50% improvement in product development efficiency, cost savings exceeding $10 billion, and a compression of vehicle development time by 18 months.

The advancement of Internet technology and customisation capability has set off research into their impacts on all business operations including New Product Development (NPD). Despite the heavy investment in research and development, few studies have examined how Information Technology (IT) is adopted; how design customisation capability is built, and whether they reveal close associations with...

Strategic planning is a vital management tool for projecting the long-range business goals and is not only for big businesses, but also applicable to small businesses in spite of their limited resources. To do this effectively, organizations should determine their strengths and weaknesses. Organizations have to produce appropriate action plans to overcome these weaknesses and it is very importa...

In spite o f much evidence o f its success, many managers hesitate to establish a policy for new product development. Their indecision often arises f rom two reasons: they fear that a defined strategy may discourage innovation and they are uncertain how to formulate a new product strategy. The author o f this article discredits the former notion and, in reply to the latter, proposes the guideli...