Balanced Key Performance Indicators in Product Development

In today’s business environment many enterprises react to changing conditions by the implementation of lean production systems. Lean offers an approach to eliminate waste and increase customer value in all processes. In the past, the focus of lean has been on the production and is now enhanced to other processes in the enterprise, e.g. product development or sales & services. In particular research approaches, so called lean development, has been introduced to improve efficiency, effectiveness and the skills of staff and organization. Enterprises like Toyota, who work with lean principles in development, can develop products in significant shorter time-to-markets with higher quality and lower costs. Enterprises that applied lean to product development process are facing the challenge of defining key performance indicators to ensure the sustainability of the continuous improvement process. Therefore, the article gives an advice what requirements the performance indicators have to meet. Based on an analysis of 11 performance indicator systems the article shows that yet not all targets are covered by performance indicators. Thus the article shows an approach to develop an enterprise specific KPI-Set.