Lean Product Development at PDMA
Two years ago, I heard a presentation on Lean Product Development at the PDMA conference, and it was all about Lean Manufacturing applied to product development. Today, I attended a panel with Michael Kennedy, Dantar Oosterwal of Sara Lee and Dan Shoenhair of Ping, alongside Sandy Munro and Mark Adkins. Dantar has been at the forefront of this work since he began working with Allen Ward when Dantar was with Harley Davidson.
Today, Dr. Ward's vision proved itself to be alive and growing. The only mention of Lean Manufacturing was a brief one, to emphasize that Lean Product Development was not Lean Manufacturing tools applied in product development. With that said, we moved on to more interesting topics, like how Ping increased R & D capacity and Sara Lee increased revenue from new products through their adaptations of the Toyota Product Development System. Sandy Munro provided his unique perspective on how pain creates breakthrough innovations and Mark Adkins shared his experience with moving a group from five phase gates to two, and in the process eliminating a lot of wasteful documentation in exchange for a leaner, faster PD process.
All of the speakers emphasized that the engineers were not a barrier to implementing lean product development - if it was implemented and communicated well. In fact, it had the opposite effect of motivating the engineers and making their jobs more enjoyable - while they got more done than ever before. This panel showed that Lean Product Development is more than just "flavor of the month" - this is one change that produces sustainable results.
Today, Dr. Ward's vision proved itself to be alive and growing. The only mention of Lean Manufacturing was a brief one, to emphasize that Lean Product Development was not Lean Manufacturing tools applied in product development. With that said, we moved on to more interesting topics, like how Ping increased R & D capacity and Sara Lee increased revenue from new products through their adaptations of the Toyota Product Development System. Sandy Munro provided his unique perspective on how pain creates breakthrough innovations and Mark Adkins shared his experience with moving a group from five phase gates to two, and in the process eliminating a lot of wasteful documentation in exchange for a leaner, faster PD process.
All of the speakers emphasized that the engineers were not a barrier to implementing lean product development - if it was implemented and communicated well. In fact, it had the opposite effect of motivating the engineers and making their jobs more enjoyable - while they got more done than ever before. This panel showed that Lean Product Development is more than just "flavor of the month" - this is one change that produces sustainable results.
posted by Katherine Radeka
at
11:28 AM
1 Comments:
I've been working with lean since 1992 but I feel like a real dope because I've never heard of the PDMA (btw, what is "BoK"?). There's a whole crew of lean bloggers but the PDMA site doesn't link to any of us nor vice versa. How odd. Tangential lean blogging. At any rate, I'm glad to see another lean girl blogger. I write about apparel manufacturing in general with lean as a particular focus.
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