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Lean started withThe Wright approach to product development

By on April 24, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized

Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle repair shop in Dayton, Ohio USA but set to designing and building the first aeroplane  in their spare time working in their shed!

So how did two hobbyists manage to achieve what many well funded, full time, industry backed inventors had failed to achieve?

They collected the existing knowledge on what experiments and tests had already been carried out then studied the results.

They soon realised that many thousands of hours and dollars were being spent for very little time in the air – 5000 hours of design & build time for 5 seconds air time was typical.

They identified 3 critical knowledge areas:

  • construction of the sustaining wings
  •  generation and application of power
  • balancing and steering of the machine

Between 1900 and June  1903 the brothers:

 

Devised

•Lift and drag measurement techniques for kites and gliders
•A wind tunnel
•Balances for measuring lift, drag and drift

Discovered

•Lift and drag calculations that others were using were incorrect
•Optimum wing shapes and ratios
•Optimum control surface areas
Invented
•Wing warping technology to control the plane in flight
•A highly efficient propeller
•A lightweight powerful engine
•The science of aeronautics

They conducted and meticulously recorded extensive experiments.

These often challenged and proved wrong the existing ‘knowledge’ and wisdom of the time.

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Lean Tools and Technology in Lean Development

By on April 23, 2012 in General, Uncategorized

– Adapt technology to fit your People & Process; In some organisations it could be the opposite (Technology has to be mature first in accordance withTechnical Readiness Level process)

– Align organisation through simple visual communication More difficult for Engineering .

– Use powerful tools for standardization & organizational learning Lean organisation (reducing number of layers…)

at Toyota are the best exponents of Lean Development and since 1991 have identified 4 Critical Success Factors as follows:
  • Creating a strong vision to ensure that design engineers care about what the customer thinks of their future services and products
  • Limit the number of late design changes by striving for Perfect Drawings and Zero EC after production drawing release
  • Focus on precise and tightly scheduled industrialised drawing production to increase effectiveness
  • Focus on quality and cost of production itself to ensure build is with the cost bracket
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Lean Product Development

By on April 19, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized

People & Partners

– Chief Engineer Role in Development phase (misunderstood in Aerospace Industry)

§ Highly experienced in Product development, small team, clear technical authority over all internal & external Eng’s, Voice of the Customer, guardian of the specifications, not a Programme Manager.  Unity of leadership
§ Decide Product & trade off between design/ Manufacturing/ Suppliers & Customer Support/ ILS so that product fulfils all requirements
§ Identify & remove Development roadblocks internal & partners/suppliers
§ Dev. schedule, product recurring costs, product reliability & op costs,

– Balance functional expertise & Programme integration

§ Programme Plateau (early concept phase & integration tasks) or Functional Plateau
(Detail design phase, cross programme optimization & learning, standardization, product/process skills)
–  Develop towering technical competence
§ Proactive hiring, early experience in other functions: Manufacturing, Customer and  Support/
§ Link to HR (Expert network, competence Mgt, specific technology dev. skills,  process)

–  Suppliers/Partners integration into Product Development

–  Build in learning & Continuous Improvement

§ Companys’ culture are mainly based on history & diff. functions (customer value,
multicultural…)

– Build a culture to support Excellence & Relentless Improvement

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Lean Production

By on April 16, 2012 in General, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized

Toyota is the most documented Lean Company, talking about Lean Production.

 

1991 – The machine that changed the world – This was the first time Toyota opened it’s doors to external consultants based on the TPS (Toyota Production System) developed by Womack and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The 5 Steps to Lean” (specify value, identify the value stream, make the value flow, let the customer pull, pursue perfection) were defined in this book.

1996 – Lean Thinking (Womack and Jones) – Easier to read, still based on TPS (Manu) with Case Studies

1997 – Concurrent Engineering Effectiveness – Jeff Liker and based on some of Toyota’s Engineering Principles

2002 – Lean Enterprise Value  –

2004 – The Toyota Way – Jeff Liker – Business Philosophy and 14 Management Principles

2006 – The Toyota Product Development System – Jeff Liker – based on the product development system not manufacturing. The product development system is the key behind the TPS and this is the first book that explores Toyota’s PDS and this is their main competitive advantage. Easier to replicate the TPS than the PDS. 13 Principles broken down, easy to read and you can dip in and out of the book.

2007 – Toyota Talent –  Jeff Liker – How to develop engineers

2007 – The Lean Product Development Guidebook –

 

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Lean Set Based Engineering

By on April 13, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized

Detailed design  Variability in the process is reduced here through high levels of  standardisation of skills, processes and the designs themselves.  This helps eliminate waste and rework which allows greater  flexibility of capacity. Detailed standardisation also maximiseslearning and continuous improvement.

Prototype /Tools  Two sets of prototype tooling are usually produced, not to test solutions but to choose the different sub-systems and check their  integration. Engineering changes will not be accepted after this  phase. This is an intensive period for system design  manufacturing and quality engineers.

Set based engineering enables many different solutions for a design can be worked on and matured at one time.  As the development time increase and moves closer to the start of production unsuitable solutions are stopped but kept on file so potentially could be used for the next new product.  The main advantage of set based concurrent engineering is that if the design concept that is chosen fails to meet customer requirements it can be quickly replaced by a robust and mature alternative solution.

Conventional engineering usually starts with the generation of new concepts and ideas too, however the main difference is that the final solution is agreed at a very early stage of the development.  This could be before all the other component final designs are decided/understood.  Therefore, as the design stages mature if problems are found the solution may have to be reworked several times to ensure it still meets the customer requirements.  The major disadvantage of this process is that usually problems are not found until later in the development stages, sometimes as late as after the start of manufacturing.  Fixes problems that occur at this stage is much more expensive as you are now trying to change actual components instead of designs on paper.

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Lean Engineering in Lean Six Sigma

By on April 12, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized
– Manufacturing has a relatively small influence on the overall cost and quality of the product or service supplied.  Remember the Value Stream?
– When Lean principles are applied across all the functions in the value stream,   true competitive advantage can be gained. This is sometimes known as Lean Enterprise
– Lean Product Development demands an integrated multi-disciplined approach.

A Lean product development process typically has four phases:

    1. Concept  The Vision for the product produced by the programme lead   who is a technical expert  and is responsible for the product   from concept to market
    2. System design   Set based concurrent engineering looks for all possible    problems and tries to resolve them early in the process. ‘Sets’   of possible solutions are generated (diverge) then gradually   narrow as learning and understanding increases i.e. design   converges. Progressively reducing specifications and   resolving ambiguity actually shortens development time.   The system design team will be multi-functional and often   located together.
    3. Detailed design.
    4. Proto type & tooling.

 

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Lean Engineering

By on April 12, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized

Manufacturing has a relatively small influence on the overall cost and quality of the product or service supplied.

Remember the Value Stream?

When Lean principles are applied across all the functions in the value stream, true competitive advantage can be gained.

This is sometimes known as Lean Enterprise Lean Product Development demands an integrated multi-disciplined approach.

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Why Lean Development ?

By on April 9, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized
  • Improving your service and manufacturing systems can only give you limited gains – this is only half the opportunity
  • There is more scope of improvement opportunities if you target the engineering of your service, products and process’
  • It can be more challenging as it is not as easy to see waste and flow
  • Many organisations have implemented lean and explored opportunities in all departments (design, purchasing, engineering, finance, HR etc)
  • They feel that this is what gives them an edge over their competitors
  • Assist in achieving swifter new products development

E.g., Toyota, Ford, Nokia and others,

We understand that we are not Toyota !!!!  However, it is important to understand some of the main differences between the Toyota culture and conventional business cultures when they develop new products as it will help you see where we can make changes to grow stronger as a company.  Also, it will enable you to understand where development systems have originated from.

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Lean Engineering in Lean Six Sigma

By on April 8, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized

Lean Six Sigma challenges for Service and Product Development are

  • Short life cycles for service offerings, products and technologies
  • Integrated development and quality approach with suppliers
  • Customer expectations becoming more demanding
  • Technology (hard/software) becoming increasingly complex
  • Extremely high requirements for service and manufacturability
  • High impact of poor OTOQOC performance on confidence
  • High costs of development of complex services and products
  • High cost of post design changes, amendments & failures

Short life cycles for both products and technologies.

[Comment: This requires dynamic changes in product designs be managed at the sub-assembly level and coordinated across product lines to gain the most synergy for our development efforts.]

Customers have rising expectations for quality of total service [Comment: Customers don’t care if the problem is a handset or service provider.]

Increasing number of product development projects.

[Comment: Nokia has chosen to compete in all technology areas.  Since technology has not yet consolidated around one or two standards, we face the need to innovate and refresh all product lines on a regular basis.  Most of our competitors are not attempting this same approach.]

Products must be capable of manufacture in the millions.

[Comment: Mistakes cannot be made in production, right the first time is essential or we will not effectively compete in this business.]

Reliance on component parts quality from suppliers.

[Comment: We do not control our own destiny for quality but must seek exceptional partners who can contribute to our overall effort on behalf of our customers.]

Software is complex and interoperability is essential & interoperability is essential.

[Comment: Again, “right the first time” is the rule for software as well as hardware.  We also rely heavily on standards and industry partnerships to assure that we maintain seamless integration between hardware manufacturers and service providers.]

 

 

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Lean Six Sigma is applicable outside volume manufacturing

By on April 7, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized
Volume manufacturing (automobiles) is where Lean thinking and tools were developed.
We use a volume manufacturing exercise (VSM)  to learn the techniques – we can visualise ‘things’ easier.
But Lean is not a ‘manufacturing’ concept, it is a volume concept.
Wherever you have volume you have processes which are dynamic.
Lean is being applied outside manufacturing; the potential is huge since for an advanced industrial economy:-
–80% non-manufacturing
–and of the 20% that is manufacturing, only 20% of that has prices driven by direct manufacturing labour.
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