(Received 19 September 2008; final version received 18 May 2009)
With the pressure of intensive global competition and the trend of shortening
product life-cycle, the procedure for new product development (NPD) has
become the focus of business concerns and investment of large corporations and
the key strategy to upgrade competitiveness of corporations. An effective NPD
procedure can meet the demands on quality, time-to-delivery and cost limitations
of a corporation. Measuring and analysing the performance of the existing NPD
procedure and pinpointing and resolving the problems of the existing NPD
procedure is the key to improve the NPD performance to meet a corporation’s
demands. Six Sigma is a systemic procedure commonly used to improve product
quality. This paper proposes a model to evaluate and improve the performance of
NPD procedures by following the systemic procedure of Six Sigma and applying
criteria defined by application of performance matrix, factor analysis, and theory
of constraints. The resulting model is then verified with real life NPD procedures
from a certain semi-conductor equipment manufacturer such that corporative
competitiveness can be enhanced through the elevating cycle of performance
evaluation, problem excavation, causes analysis, and countermeasure determination
and execution proposed by this paper.