More than a decade ago, Honeywell International Inc.'s aerospace division was on top of its game. Considered to be an industry leader, the division was riding high on its successes, leveraging lean principles to drive efficiencies throughout its manufacturing operations.
What a difference a few years can make. By the mid-90s, that same Honeywell division found itself desperately searching for a rebound. Competition was up, market share was down, and customers were complaining that, while product quality was good, Honeywell's pricing was at a premium and it took far too long for the company's new designs to make their way to market.
"That was when the light bulb went on and we realized we had to do something to change our development paradigm," explains Cliff Fiore, a certified black belt Six Sigma and lean expert in Honeywell's Aerospace division (Phoenix). "The question was, could we apply the benefits and gains we had enjoyed from our Six Sigma-based manufacturing world to how we produce products? That set the stage for us to go down the path."
The path that Honeywell traveled is one a handful of manufacturers are only now ready to explore: Applying lean principles to the practice of product development. Lean, popularized over 20 years ago as a series of techniques aimed at wringing waste out of manufacturing processes and operations, is now gaining a toehold among experts and early adopters like Honeywell, who view the methodology as a way to develop better products faster, with less waste, and at a reduced cost. Well-documented successes of lean concepts such as value-stream mapping, flow, kaizen, poka yoke, and reuse at manufacturing leaders such as Toyota Motor Co. have prompted many to consider spreading the gospel of lean to product development functions as the next logical step.
Product lifecycle management (PLM) software vendors, perhaps with an acute sense of timing and a nose for opportunity, have recently stepped up their message around the role PLM can play in lean product development. While their pitches vary, most play up how PLM's core data management, workflow, collaboration, business process, and project management capabilities can serve as conduits for an injection of waste-saving lean principles. They also say the tool sets are critical to delivering the visibility required to promote reuse in both product design and sourcing strategies while discouraging waste -- administrative or otherwise.
"The movement now to include product development is really a function of the fact that companies have been successful in implementing lean initiatives in production and the supply chain," notes Marc Lind, vice president of marketing at Aras Corp. (Lawrence, MA), one of the PLM vendors actively talking up lean product development as part of its PLM pitch. "But you need to have lean thinking applied throughout the company in order to maximize the impact of lean initiatives. It started by getting your own production house in order [and] was extended to suppliers who fed the production area; now the next logical step is product development, which feeds production with new products."
New product development may be the next logical step for lean, but it's not necessarily a straight shot. In the tangible world of manufacturing, it's easy to see and measure scrap and rework and identify areas of waste that can be eliminated by applying lean practices such as kaizen. Not so in the case of product development. Here, the flow is about information, not physical materials, and waste in the process is much more difficult to pin down.
For example, many experts contend that the iterative process so closely associated with design is essential to creativity and, if identified as waste and stripped away, could ignite problems within product development. There are also huge cultural barriers to getting engineers to embrace many of the repetitive and standardized development models associated with lean because they believe these undermine innovation and creativity.
Nevertheless, making the connection between lean practices and product development, with PLM as the enabling technology, is important, analysts contend, and not just some vendor sales blather. Lean puts product lifecycle management in the context of process improvement, thus providing a great starting point for manufacturers to consider PLM as part of any continuous program for improving how they build and design new products. Along with PLM, technologies such as portals, workflow, and ERP -- which didn't exist on any grand scale 10 years ago -- can also make the difference between succeeding or failing with a lean initiative, experts say.
The Two Sides of Lean