Lean product development: : How can lean product development be used to improve the value stream for an ITC company?

Abstract: A changing environment in a globalised world causes organisations and companies to be exposed to new conditions. The demands on companies in such an environment are becoming increasingly difficult to master and the demands on employees and management teams will increase. A sustainable solution to this is not to work more and harder, but to work smarter. To identify queues and bottlenecks in their processes, value stream mapping is a common practice for many companies.Furthermore, lean product development is an approach that can be used to maintain, or even increase, the company’s competitiveness. Examples of methods used in lean product development are continuous improvement, visual planning and knowledge gaps.The study includes an extensive literature review and a case study to complement the literature on LM Ericsson. Ericsson is currently working in a global world with global challenges and demands, and must continuously improve their time-to-market and reduce the cost to maintain its competitive position as one of the world's leading telecommunications companies. Issues found internally have been the starting point and base to answer the master thesis major research question.This thesis aims to, within lean product development, deepen the understanding of how this type of tools can be used to reduce lead times and increase the level of competition in the global market. Based on this description the following research question was presented:How can lean product development be used to improve the value stream for an ITC company?The results of the thesis are several conclusions. The process for new product introduction (NPI) is mapped with value stream analysis and suggestions on how to introduce lean product development to reduce the throughput time for an NPI project. Implementing a new agile way of working, such as lean product development, cannot be seen as a one-off project, but must be seen as a learning process that will take several years to implement. Lean product development proposes to work with the knowledge gaps for making key decisions at the right time, thereby maintaining flexibility as long as possible but at the same time creating the conditions to respect the decisions taken.In conclusion, the thesis work results in the recommendation for Ericsson to continue mapping their processes and to introduce lean product development as part of improving their NPI process. Because of the classified information, improvements are not presented in detail in the report, but only presented to Ericsson, and are therefore not published in this thesis.