This is especially true for tasks further downstream in the product development process where manufacturing capability becomes an essential competitive advantage.
Our experience with improving product development processes has shown that achieving traditional manufacturing process improvement goals such as reducing variation, relieving process bottlenecks, eliminating rework, and managing capacity, can reduce development times by as much as 30 to 50 percent.
Several principles form the core of an only recently recognized system that is to product development what the Toyota Production System has been to manufacturing:
A holistic, systems approach to product development.
We begin with looking at the basic elements of your product development system - people, processes, and technology. Highly skilled, intelligently organized people are the heart of the product development system. Processes are designed to minimize waste and maximize the capability of the people who use them. Finally, technology must be right sized, solution focused and selected to enhance the performance of the people and the process. When these fundamental system elements are coherent by design, they combine to create a truly synergistic system effect.
An embedded customer-first approach to product development.
The customer-first philosophy results in a deep understanding of customer defined value, which is the first step in any product development process. All system participants must understand customer-defined value from the start. Product development must deliver a product design that both meets customer needs and is capable of efficient manufacture if we expect to actually deliver this value to the customer.
Synchronized processes for simultaneous execution.
Effective concurrent engineering requires that each function maximize the utility of information available from the previous function as it becomes available. That is to say, they must do the most that they can with only that portion of the design data that is not likely to change. Otherwise, working with early data will result in tremendous waste and actually require a longer duration than a linear process. Each function’s processes are designed to move forward simultaneously, building around stable data as it becomes available. I refer to this practice as simultaneous execution.
Rigorous standardization that creates strategic flexibility.
This seeming paradox is at the heart of achieving quality and efficiency by creating far more predictable quality and timing outcomes than would otherwise be possible. This principle includes concepts and tools such as reusability, common architecture, and standard processes. It is crucial in driving waste out of the product development process. In fact, standardized skills, design standards, and standard processes allow for specific program customization, broader scope of individual responsibility, a just-in-time human resource strategy, flexible product development capacities and many other system benefits. These standards are also crucial to downstream lean manufacturing capabilities.
Go-to-the-source engineering.
In this day of high-tech engineering it is very tempting for engineers to divide their time equally between conference rooms and their cubicles. But as Kelly Johnson, the famous head of Lockheed’s legendary Skunk Works said, “An engineer should never be more than a stone’s throw away from the physical product.” At Toyota this philosophy is referred to as gentchi genbutsu and is practiced in many ways. Examples of this philosophy in action include spending a significant amount of pre-program time at manufacturing plants and dealerships, by working on competitor teardowns, or by personally fitting parts on prototypes.
