Tools to Lead Supplier Performance in New Product Development Project

New product development is becoming vital for companies to survive in fast changing markets. Customers are demanding new products faster, with good quality and with newest technology. The case company is responding to this demand by defining their new product development process in a new way allowing open innovation be a bigger part of the process. The problem in the old process was that it was not defining the responsibilities so well and not taking into account all the actions that needed to happen at the supplier in order to achieve the time-to-market and quality targets. The problem was that the lead time of the NPD projects was too long compared to the targets and the amount of corrective actions during and after the project were too high. Since the company operates with continuous improvement they saw a big opportunity in this process development. The target of the new process is to decrease the lead time of the NPD project and maintain a stable quality level through the whole project. The case company is developing a Supplier operations project management (SOPM) matrix to describe the whole New Product development process from supplier operations with detailed tasks in every project phase. Based on this matrix the purpose of this Master’s thesis is to develop supplier operations project management tools to support the work of a supplier operations project manager who is responsible of leading suppliers in the new product development project. This work is done when the company is still in a development phase of a new process for new product development which made it impossible to gather information if targets set to the new process were met. Developing a new process takes time and the implementation has already begun but the nature of new product development is quite long which means that to get a clear picture of the results is going to take several years. But as a clear result the tools were released for use. Estimation of the benefits of the tools is that time used before for creating the tools for working with the supplier was around 20% of the time per project manager. And now with introduced tool set that time can be completely used for actual daily work and not creating support documents