A DEA benchmarking methodology for strategic management of new product development based on decentralized profit-center business model

Abstract

In today's highly competitive marketplace, technology-driven large organizations widely adopt decentralized profit-center business model. In order to complete a series of NPD activities on time and in budget, the profit-center managers need an objective benchmarking approaches to gain precious perception into the relation of different resource allocations, profits, costs and times for each NPD activity. Thus, this study put forward a novel benchmarking methodology to optimize the NPD activities within a profit center for achieving the maximum profit goal and to guide NPD engineers to learn the best benchmarking practices. By applying the real case of the electric scooter design project, this research demonstrates the methodology at work with superior results, comparing to other existing approaches.