During the course of pursuing lean “nirvana,” it is inevitable that you will run into a gap of your current knowledge compared to where you would like to be. Having all of the answers all of the time is, of course, not realistic or even practical. When I run into that challenge of a difficult question or not being sure of where to turn, the selection process for me turns to the resources listed below:
AME Benchmarking
Community of Practice (CoP)
www.ame.org
This resource is both invaluable, but also virtually unlimited. When logging into the AME member website, the Benchmarking tab has the Query Response Library that can be searched for previous question and response. The cool benefit is that if it is not there, the AME office will help you find answers to your question through interaction with all of the members of the CoP — Wow! It’s like having a panel of experts at your disposal!
Superfactory.com
www.superfactory.com
Kevin L. Meyer started Superfactory many years ago and it has become a web staple for lean resources and lean activities and events. Do you want to know what lean events are going on in your area or around the United States? Superfactory has them all. If you want to post your own event, you can send the details to Superfactory and they will post it for you.
George Koenigsaecker
Lean Investments, LLC
George is an industry recognized leader of lean transformations. His most recent book, Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation (Productivity Press, 2009), is a great
resource. It provides answers to many questions. When answers cannot be had by the book, George has a wealth of knowledge of lean. He is one of the most “connected” people on the planet in regards to lean. If he does not know where to find the information (which is rare), he will know who likely does know what you need! George can be contacted via e-mail at gk@simpler.com.
Dr. Robert “Doc” Hall
Professor emeritus, operations
management, Indiana University
When you have exhausted all of the other options, Doc Hall is the penultimate “last resort.” Doc’s vast knowledge and keen lean insight are unparalleled. Doc not only knows an amazing breadth of operations and lean, he has depth beyond comparison. Doc can usually be reached through AME, or at his e-mail address, Rhall99829@aol.com.
The Lean Machine, How Harley-Davidson Drove Top-Line Growth and Profitability with Revolutionary Lean Product Development
When consumers tick off the list of products or companies nearly destroyed by fatal design flaws — the Pinto, the Corvair, Toyota — we all wonder how such well-managed and profitable operations such as Ford, GM, and Toyota messed up so badly. Were the problems created by improper operation — in the case of the Corvair, taking turns too fast, causing the wheels to tuck under? Or did manufacturing fall victim to imperfect supplier parts? Or could the problem go deeper, right back to the original design, where trade-offs and make-do compromises have long-lasting and enormous repercussions? For some catastrophes, we will never really know the exact cause of product failure. In the Corvair for example, forensic engineering pointed to more than three possible root causes that included over-inflated front tires, and the lack of a $6 rollbar that was added on later models — of fatal product failures.
Recent Toyota troubles highlight the importance of sound and creative product design. When Dantar Oosterwal wrote The Lean Machine, How Harley-Davidson Drove Top-Line Growth and Profitability with Revolutionary Lean Product Development, he could not have overstated the critical importance of new product development and engineering design in manufacturing and all our supply networks. Whether it’s brakes or steering or accelerators or gas tank design, all of us have been alarmed by the seemingly clueless approach of manufacturers to good and safe design.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Enter Harley-Davidson, the iconic American manufacturer of motorcycles large and small. This is where Oosterwal shows us a very different approach from the entire new product engineering and launch process that North American producers and their suppliers have used for decades.
New product design and development is essentially our last big opportunity zone, where American manufacturers still hold significant competitive advantage. But we haven’t realized the full innovation potential in the process of designing products. Why wouldn’t any company want to take advantage of the exponential profit and cycle time improvements that Oosterwal describes? Don’t results such as the ones that Harley-Davidson realized — development time cut in half and product development throughput increased four times — sound good enough, for a start at least?
For the United States, innovation is our last wide-open frontier. Taking good ideas and fashioning them into successful, profitable new products is where we shine, and we can only get better, according to Oosterwal. And that’s why I loved this book — it’s a real and refreshingly usable gift of insight into new product design, engineering, and launch. The guys who populate these arcane and complex functions weren’t trained to do things quick and dirty, to fix production problems with a rubber mallet and a two by four, hence the resistance many companies may find when they even hint at the type of revolutionary change Oosterwal describes.
Don’t let the word “lean” in the title deceive you — lean as applied to upstream product development is not about doing kaizen blitzes to remove obvious wastes, nor are all the clear and familiar lean approaches to work design directly applicable here. Singular attention to lean practices as applied only to manufacturing — to the point of what my book partner the great Dick Morley dubbed “corporate anorexia” — won’t do it. This new approach, the last significant methodology change since Don Clausing’s concurrent design, is about being sensible and precise, and dare we say it — creative — before designs lock into formulaic and rigid identities that take products down the wrong paths. For example, when Oosterwal’s mentor the late Dr. Allen Ward described Toyota’s development process, he wanted to make it clear to managers how their approach emphasized knowledge first. This example clearly illustrated just what knowledge-based product development is.
The exhaust systems example on p. 176 gets to the heart of how this system works. Oosterwal cites the development of exhaust systems that Ward had uncovered in his research. Ward explained that Toyota might design and test 50 rudimentary muffler systems early in a new car design to build knowledge. Knowledge here means feedback from suppliers on technology limits, for instance, as well as internal engineering and design learning the landscape in depth. Through the setbased development process, Toyota would give their suppliers loose requirements and ask them to come up with many ideas and build many different systems. These early basic prototypes were used only to explore the limits of the possibilities for the system. The intent was to gain knowledge by defining the trade-off parameters and the failure limits. The data were expressed visually to capture knowledge, which was passed from project to project as each new project used previously developed knowledge and added to the organization’s knowledge and understanding.
How very different is this approach to the methodology that locks in designs and supplier parts early in the cycle, after which problems lead to endless rework loops, quality problems, slipped schedules, increased engineering costs, and worse. The damage to the supply network is hard to define when new product designs go awry. Suffice it to say that the costs to smaller suppliers are exponential. When a supplier to Honda, for instance, experiences a delivery delay or missed shipment that causes a line-down situation, the costs to the car company are estimated at over $26,000 per minute, another reason to get it right the first time.
The Lean Machine is an important and revolutionary book that will be extremely important to all engineers, new product development managers, CEOs, and consultants.
Other books in this area include Mike Kennedy’s cult classic Product Development for the Lean Enterprise, Why Toyota’s System is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It, now just known as The Blue Book, and the incomprehensible book originally issued by Dr. Allen Ward. Of these three seminal works, Oosterwal’s new book is my favorite because it’s at the right level, it has a tolerable mix of stories and cost curves, with even a few formulas thrown in, it makes sense to C-suite guys, and it shows the process through real experience, which is the true and only way to build credibility with tough customers like new product and design engineers. And I love anything Harley.
Patricia E. Moody is a management consultant and writer based in Boston (The Kaizen Blitz, Breakthrough Partnering, The Big Squeeze, Powered by Honda, The Purchasing Machine, The Technology Machine, The Perfect Engine, etc.). She is Target’s former editor and she sits on the advisory board of MIT’s Sloan Management Review. She can be reached at tricia@patriciaemoody.com.
