Abstract
In today’s highly competitive marketplace and environment, technology-driven organization or companies widely adopt decentralized profit-center business model. In order tp complete a series of new product development (NPD) activities on time and in budget efficiently, the profit-center managers need an objective benchmarking approaches to gain precious perception into the relation of different resource allocation, profit, costs and times for each NPD activity. Thus, this research put forward a novel benchmarking methodology based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) 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. According to the properties of the profit center, this study proposes five evaluating models, including (1) the feasibility evaluation of activity time under limited resources, (2) the minimum activity time estimation under limited resources, (3) the cost-time performance analysis, (4) the contractor selection for the outsourcing NPD activities, (5) the profit estimation of a profit center. By applying the real case of the electric scooter design project, this reaserch demonstrates the methodology at work with superior results, comparing to other existing approaches. The methodology helps the profit-center manager to reach the project deadline and make the max profit by allocating resources efficiently.