MBA 690 - Production Plan: Integrating Lean Operations and Design

This report details a production plan for a new business opportunity, utilizing value stream mapping and concurrent engineering supported by agile methodology. It incorporates lean management principles, focusing on minimizing waste through a pull system and reducing setup time, while a...Read More

Running head: MANAGEMENT
Management
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author note

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Tools and techniques
Macy’s will use value stream mapping as the process of designing the new software
which will facilitate in identifying the different phases and factors to be considered in
developing the new software (Tyagi et al., 2015). This method will visualise all the necessary
steps starting from product creation to delivering the final product to the end consumers.
This will consist of evaluating the current issues in software by taking the perspective of
different departments. A small team would be developed to develop the workflow
management and map the overall process flow of developing the new software. Concurrent
engineering will be used to support the development of the product which will facilitate in
adding necessary features simultaneously based on the value stream generated (Stjepandić,
Wognum & Verhagen, 2015). Agile methodology will be used to support concurrent
engineering so that the new software development process has high flexibility and new
changes can be incorporated with the system based on the value stream (Rajput, 2016).
However, it is essential to incorporate value analysis to make sure that the work has been
accomplished using optimal cost and there is no wastage.
Incorporation of lean management
The product development requires lean management principles to make the process
effective. The first tool is setting up a pull system where the organization will limit the
number of tasks to be worked on simultaneously which will facilitate in reducing the amount
of work in progress. However, even though, agile methodology will be implemented in
development of software, it is essential to limit the number of tasks to prevent wastage. The
setup time will also be reduced which will facilitate in increasing the productivity and
reducing wastage of time. There are generally seven wastages which has to be considered for
a software development cycle and they are transport, inventory, waiting, motion, over

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processing, defects and overproduction (Pournaghshband & Watson, 2017). These seven
factors have to be taken into account to implement 5S within the development of the new
software.
Factors essential for sustainability
The crucial factors for reducing wastage in the software development process has
already been discussed in the previous section. The project will evaluate these points in each
phase of the project (Tyagi et al., 2015). The production plan would consist of specific tasks
and milestones. In order to manage sustainability of the production plan, elements such as
transport, inventory, waiting, motion, over processing, defects and overproduction will be
considered in each phase. The status report would be analysed after each phase to check the
progress of the project and its is alignment with the plan in terms of time, cost and resource
allocation.
Legal, cultural, global, and human involvement
The software developed will access personal data of consumers and it is critical to
make sure that the consumers feel safe about their data being stored within a company’s
database. The legal compliances and guidelines mentioned by the regulatory bodies will be
followed along with the IP policies (Briand et al., 2017). The diverse workforce involved
within the project would increase the cultural involvement and users would be involved in
this process of developing interactive software as it increases the efficiency of the system. In
terms of workforce involvement, the project would choose people carefully having different
skills to form a project management team which would handle the overall development of the
software.

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References
Briand, L., Bianculli, D., Nejati, S., Pastore, F., & Sabetzadeh, M. (2017). The case for
context-driven software engineering research: Generalizability is overrated. IEEE
Software, 34(5), 72-75.
Pournaghshband, H., & Watson, J. (2017, December). Should Six Sigma Be Incorporated
into Software Development & Project Management?. In 2017 International
Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)(pp.
1021-1026). IEEE.
Rajput, B. (2016). Software Quality Assurance Using Agile Software Methodology in
Education Assessment Industry.
Stjepandić, J., Wognum, N., & Verhagen, W. J. (2015). Concurrent Engineering in the 21st
Century. Foundations, developments and challenges. Cham [Switzerland]: Springer.
Tyagi, S., Choudhary, A., Cai, X., & Yang, K. (2015). Value stream mapping to reduce the
lead-time of a product development process. International Journal of Production
Economics, 160, 202-212.