A new lean tool for design management: design cost deployment

The design process wields substantial influence across various dimensions in product’s life cycle, encompassing functionality, manufacturability, assembly, safety and numerous other facets. Consequently, it represents a significant contributor to the product’s overall cost. Enhancing the design process translates into accessing diverse opportunities within an ever-competitive market landscape. This paper introduces a novel lean framework explicitly that pinpoints and eradicates losses occurring during the design phases using an Overall Design Effectiveness (ODE) metric that assesses the performance of a company’s technical department. Our Design Cost Deployment (DCD) lean toolkit then identifies, analyses and eliminates design-related losses. The DCD implementation involves five core steps, each necessitating a purpose-built matrix for loss detection, cause–effect relationship investigation, cost quantification related to losses and guidance for decision-making in the context of improvements. This framework was tested in a real-world industrial scenario, involving a mechanical manufacturing company and was both to use straightforward and effective in its results.