Overview
The term ‘Lean’ has become synonymous with excellence in
manufacturing – an environment with minimal waste with regard to
inventory and labor. While applying lean thinking to product
development processes will certainly improve the efficiency of
development operations, it will not reproduce the astounding
capabilities of Toyota for developing better products much faster and
much cheaper. This involves an entirely different way of thinking
about development – a thinking that considers the most significant
waste to be any loss of knowledge, what works and what doesn’t work on
any project, that isn’t efficiently used for all future products. This
level of lean can only be achieved by fundamentally changing the
operational paradigms of development processes.
Key Principles
- System Designer Entrepreneurial Leadership – A
technical leadership paradigm that efficiently brokers the right
knowledge into the right product
- Set-based Concurrent Engineering – An exploration
paradigm that generates extensive knowledge from many perspectives
to maximize product alternatives with minimal risk.
- Responsibility-based Planning & Control – A
management paradigm that provides efficiency, flexibility, and
knowledge as the backbone for project execution.
- Expert Engineering Workforce – a paradigm that
assumes the engineers have both the technical capability and access
to the right knowledge to make the proper decisions to optimize the
current product while building the knowledge for future products
Potential Benefits
Companies transforming to these paradigms should expect:
- 4X increase in development productivity
- 2-3X decrease in development cycle time
- 2-3X decrease in development cost
- 2-10X increase in innovation
- 2-5X decrease in development risk
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