Abstract
Methods such as T-type Matrix and Progress Review Table have been used to analyze root causes of failure in new product development. It is, however, difficult for small companies to use these methods because they have few development cases. This paper focused on the few development cases that make it difficult for small companies to analyze the causes of failure in new product development and proposed a new procedure that identifies causes of the failure to prevent recurrence by delving into a single case. This procedure describes three process flows: the “ implemented flow ” that corresponds to failure cases, the “ benchmarking flow ” that corresponds to success cases and the “general flow” that corresponds to common new product development flow applied in the organization, and then identifies causes of failure by comparing these flows from the upstream to the downstream and listing all process gaps and their causes.
This procedure was applied to the case of company A and compared with a conventional method, i.e., Progress Review Table that has closest properties. As the results, it has been shown that even in a single development case, the proposed procedure has the same effects as using plural cases to identify common causes behind them, and when compared with Progress Review Table, gets more causes and improvements and make it easier to delve into causes and to embody improvements.
