Abstract
For two years from Oct. 1999,product development process improvement initiative had been done at Hitachi Ltd., Semiconductor and Integrated Circuit Division (Renesas Technology Crop. since Apr. 2003). New project management activities were implemented organizationally. The concept for institutionalization is important because the issues are not only in defining process but also implementing process. Before the process improvement, product development schedules delayed sometimes with chip prototypes re-fabrications caused by the lack of reviews against customer's schedule pressures. There were three factors of this issue as follows : (1)'What to do' were not explicitly defined;(2) There is no management system to ensure "What to do" to be done;(3) Designers spend too much time for inessential works. Three action plans were carried out, as follows : (1) To define the organizational standard development process as standard WBS (SWBS), (2) To accommodate supporting IT systems for projects performing SWBS, (3) To establish support group. After that, all product development projects adopted SWBS. As a result, the number of deficit projects decreased 80%, the number of re-fabrication decreased 29%, and the ratio of engineers efforts for essential work increased from 55% to 80%.
