Kenneth Crow
©1996 DRM Associates
INTRODUCTION
In this era of "faster, cheaper and better", companies are focusing on improving the product development process. Some of the improvement opportunities are obvious to personnel within an organization. Other opportunities may not be obvious or there may be so many things to do that it becomes a question of where to start. In addition, management will typically have a number of questions in the back of their minds. How do we compare with the rest of industry? With the best in industry? What are our strengths and weaknesses? What improvements need to be made? Where do we start? What are our priorities given the resources that we have available? What benefits can we expect? How can we figure this out quickly so that we can get started?
No organization can implement all aspects of integrated product development immediately. IPD can best be viewed as a journey (continuing process improvement) rather than a destination. Priorities need to be developed for implementing the various facets of a integrated product development environment. The organization must start by understanding its strategic direction (e.g., being the low cost producer, the most innovative producer, the highest quality producer, flexibility to respond to new programs and directions). Next, the organization must assess its strengths and weaknesses.
The Product Development Assessment (PDA) methodology provides a thorough review of the development process based on 250 best practices that have been identified from studying companies' product development activities around the world. This level of detail allows identification of specific strategy, organizational, process, methodology and technology issues to address as part of an improvement program. These best practices are organized into categories for summarization and reporting purposes as shown on the following page.
Most of these best practices are universal - they apply to the development of any kind of product in any type and size of company. Some of these best practices are relevant to only certain types of products or business environments (e.g., maintainability/serviceability practices don't apply to consummable products, design for manufacturability isn't as important with one-off product such as a satellite, etc.). Therefore, an importance weighting is used to tailor the importance of the best practice to each company's products and business environment.
Associated with each of these best practices is a set of questions to aid in this
assessment process. A company's product development activities are evaluated with respect
to each of these best practices, and a quantitative rating is developed. This evaluation
is supported by a verbal description of the characteristics of the organization's product
development approach as it evolves toward a world class approach to IPD. A worksheet for
this evaluation process is shown below.
In addition to the performance rating against each best practice and for each higher level category, an overall performance rating is developed by again assigning a weighting factor to each category based on their importance given the nature of the business and the product. This performance rating, when compared to that of other companies, gives an indication of the urgency of improving the development process.
Gap analysis is then employed to focus attention on the improvement opportunities that will yield the highest payoff. The categories with high weighting factors and relatively low performance ratings yield the largest gaps between what is important to the organization and what it does well. these are the areas that require the highest priority in improving the development process and will likely have the largest payoff. On the other hand, categories with low importance ratings and relatively high performance ratings indicate low priority areas not deserving as much attention. This analysis becomes the basis for identifying implementation actions and priorities. An example of this performance summary and gap analysis is shown below.
An examination of the performance ratings against individual best practice criteria will help identify the specific areas that require attention. This then becomes the basis for developing priorities and, eventually, an improvement or implementation plan. In addition, the expertise of an internal manager or outside consultant very knowledgeable in integrated product development concepts and improvement strategies can aid in identifying priorities. This expertise is important because of natural relationships and sequences with the implementation and use of these best practices. For example, moving to a digital product model is not realistic until there is a certain level of CAD capability and network infrastructure in place.
Quality function deployment (QFD) matrices can be used to translate these high priority improvement categories into specific actions, priorities, and implementation prerequisites to take with respect to strategy, organization, process, methods, and technology. and establishing implementation priorities. Given the many elements of IPD, the role of executive management in defining a vision and establishing critical success factors is important to develop implementation priorities.
Once priorities are established, a project plan needs to be developed for implementing IPD concepts, effectively introducing supporting tools and techniques, and improving the development processes. Personnel resources to support implementation or improvement activities are required. If the overall performance rating is low, a critical mass of personnel within the organization needs to develop an understanding of the concepts of IPD. These people can then refine the implementation plan, perform various implementation activities, be involved in defining the desired way to develop new products based on IPD approaches, and assist in communicating the desired approach to the rest of the organization.
It is recommended that the implementation plan begin with the low cost activities that yield high payoffs. In the absence of any other indications of strengths and weaknesses, we believe these initial actions should include forming product development teams as the basis for product development and utilizing the quality function deployment (QFD) methodology as a method for deploying the voice of the customer. As these steps begin to generate savings, the organization can move on to other IPD elements and self-fund the initiative.
There are two elements of implementation planning that must be addressed. The first one that has been described is the implementation plan for the enterprise activities. It covers all the activities to create the IPD environment for all development projects - the activities that cannot cost effectively be done by an individual development project. This would include defining a streamlined product development process, developing manufacturability guidelines, installing appropriate CAD/CAE/CAM and product data management system tools, etc.
The second plan element, the project deployment plan, the IPD actions that will be taken to support an individual product development project. This plan would be developed with the participation of the member of management responsible for the development effort, e.g., engineering manager, program manager, product line manager, etc. This plan would address the team structure required to support the project, a staffing plan supporting early involvement, the training requirements, facilities and collocation implications, the technical resources required (workstations, software, etc.), the use of techniques such as quality function deployment, supplier/subcontractor involvement, the development methodology, establishment of project policies and strategies, etc.
Many organizations take totally different directions in the evolution of their product
development process. While some of these differences are the result of legitimate
differences in their business strategy, business environment, organization, and the nature
of their products, a frequent problem is the lack of a common framework of the best
practices of product development. With extensive investment of time, an organization could
develop the broad, internal expertise necessary to produce an effective improvement plan
for product development. This would require significant training, attendance at
conferences, and extensive benchmarking. This structured Product Development Assessment
methodology based on these 250 best practices of product development provides an
inexpensive alternative to identifying strengths and weaknesses relative to a common
framework of an extensive set of best practices. This enables an organization to more
quickly develop an action plan for improving the development process
DRM Associates developed this assessment methodology and led the consortium that
identified these best practices. The best practices resulted from numerous company visits
and attendance at over 100 conferences and workshops on integrated product development.
For further information on the product development assessment or the product development
self-assessment diskette, contact Kenneth Crow at the address or telephone number below.
KENNETH A. CROW is President of DRM Associates. His firm focuses on product development and the implementation of strategies and practices such as integrated product development, time-to-market, business process re-engineering, and total quality management. He is a recognized expert in the field of integrated product development with over twenty years of experience. He has provided guidance to executive management in formulating a integrated product development program and reengineering the development process as well as assisted product development teams applying IPD to specific development projects. He led a consortium to identify 250 best practices or product development and developed a benchmarking and assessment methodology based on these best practices.
He has worked internationally with many Fortune 500 companies. He has written articles and
papers, contributed to books, presented at conferences, and conducted workshops world-wide
on product development and manufacturing. He is a founding member and President of the
Society of Concurrent Engineering. For further information, contact Ken at DRM Associates,
2613 Via Olivera, Palos Verdes, CA 90274; by phone at (310) 377-5569; by fax at (310)
377-1315 or email at kcrow@aol.com.
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