-
Seeing and Understanding the Work in Product and Process Development
The biggest benefit of making the work visible – the conversations and interactions it facilitates. The ensuing dialogue about the plan facilitates mutual understanding amongst the different functions involved about how their work fits together to deliver customer value. This isn’t about just understanding the plan, but understanding each other and the impact of decisions and…
-
Coach’s Corner: Designing the Entire Value Stream From Concept to Product End Life
When people think about the environmental impact of the products they use, most think about the implications of their use and their disposal at the end of life. As design improvements continue to reduce emissions during the use phase, the importance of reducing the emissions during production becomes more evident. One-third of emissions come from making products. Designing your value stream to have a lower environmental impact in production could reduce your costs, lower your carbon footprint, and influence future…
-
How a virtual obeya can enable effective teamwork
With an obeya, we are trying to create conditions for teams to effectively work together to make decisions and solve problems… understanding the work visually. This shared understanding of the work needs to include how everyone’s work fits together including interdependencies.
-
The Value of A Visual Schedule is Developing Shared Understanding
Collaboratively creating a schedule gives individuals the autonomy they need to control what they are working on. It also helps connect to purpose with how their individual work fits into the overall development plan. Mastery is focused on skill development, which usually isn’t part of schedule development but is a piece of the puzzle you…
-
The Dark Side of Concurrent Engineering
Avoiding the “dark side” begins with understanding the work and interdependencies to enable downstream partners to provide inputs at the right times to incorporate their knowledge earlier in the process. This isn’t just inviting people to participate in meetings earlier, but rather understanding the work together and what information is relevant at the right time and then…
-
Cutting Carbon Emissions and Product Costs Through Lean Product and Process Development
When managing or improving a business we often focus on the areas that have the biggest contribution to the bottom line. The biggest opportunity to impact these costs comes during the design phase since decisions made during design lock in the on-going costs. These costs aren’t just financial, but environmental as well. Many of these…
-
What’s a good “small step” to start off my LPPD transformation?
Visual management (VM) is a great place to start your lean product and process development (LPPD) transformation, especially if you have prior experience using VM. A VM system works the same in LPPD as it would in manufacturing or any other environment. And if you don’t have experience with VM it is a great place…