Just as Toyota Motor Co. set the benchmark for applying lean principles to the process of manufacturing, it's now raising the bar for a product development approach that, experts say, increases productivity four times beyond traditional methodologies.
The Toyota Product Development system, a knowledge-based paradigm that forgoes structure and operational activities in favor of a more fluid, continuous learning environment, is a radical departure from traditional product development processes, not to mention a potential culture shock to most U.S. manufacturers. In the Toyota environment, trial and error and knowledge sharing guide teams to create a world of product possibilities, and those experiences are later leveraged to refine product specifications.
"In a traditional product development set up, you fundamentally come very quickly to a set of design specs, design to those specs until you have problems, then you fix the problems and iterate through the design and so on, until the job is done," explains Michael Kennedy, CEO of Targeted Convergence (Coppell, TX), a consulting company built on the premise of lean design. "With the Toyota way, the purpose of product development is not a particular project, but rather to learn as much as possible and test all limits until you have the underlying knowledge of how to make a product."
Key to Toyota's approach, Kennedy says, is set-based concurrent engineering, which differs from the point-based concurrent engineering that's been around for more than 20 years. The more familiar model involves teams developing a few concepts and iterating between the detail and testing stage if required, Kennedy says. With the set-based concurrent engineering model, engineers consider many concepts at once -- including those of each subsystem involved. All are continuously evaluated against each other in order to eliminate the weak ideas, leverage collected knowledge, and combine concepts in different ways.
To dispel some of the mystique surrounding this way of thinking, as well as to help companies implement the Toyota Product Development system, Kennedy has written a book, Product Development for the Lean Enterprise. Using a storytelling approach with a fictional company as the case study, Kennedy highlights the problems with existing product development approaches and cultures and shows how a company can take the steps necessary to embark on this most important journey.
If it all sounds somewhat esoteric and against the grain of everything U.S. companies are taught about product development, it is, Kennedy admits. But he believes it's essential to companies' futures. "It's not a culture engineers and designers don't want," Kennedy says, "it's one that the thinking in this country has driven out."