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Lean development in contract manufacturing
Knowledge pills
Home / Articles / Lean development in contract manufacturing
Lean development in contract manufacturing
Knowledge pills
Highlights
Customer-driven product development has specificities that differentiate it from new product research and development, although the two activities often share the same resources in the design area;
Effective management of the order book requires the definition of a dedicated and optimized order development process according to Lean logic;
Priority conflicts are resolved by job classification systems with defined standard time and resource absorption as well as through the introduction of visual planning management tools;
Completing the journey to operational excellence is the introduction of appropriate tools to ensure standardization and dissemination of technical know-how and Best Practices.
Designing and manufacturing a product to customer order falls under the operational model commonly classified as Engineering-to-Order (ETO) and is often a challenge not only from a technical point of view, but also from a logistical-organizational perspective.
Products belonging to this type can be variants, customizations or undeveloped configurations of products in the catalog, as well as products completely designed from scratch to specifications dictated by the customer. The common feature of all these cases is "one-shot" production, i.e., not repetitive over time or at any rate performed on extremely small volumes.
