The Savvy Lean Product Development Conference
Integrating Toyota’s Product Development
System Elements:
Putting Toyota’s Lean Principles into Practice
November 14, 2006
Bloomington, MN

Conference Results Summary

Toyota's Product Development System (TDS) has demonstrated that it is lean and, more importantly, built on fundamental principles that every product design/development organization can and should study, interpret and implement.

The six case studies presented at this Conference were extremely well received for their learning content. Over 80 positive "comments" were posted for the presenters and the participants to see and discuss during the conference. The interaction and conversations between conference attendees and presenters indicated a strong intent to improve product development processes at all the firms represented. Members of the audience were in general agreement that Toyota TDS is authentic and truly lean and, therefore, worth the effort to learn and adopt. It was also agreed that future Savvy Lean Development conferences should continue case studies that focus on the variety of ways (Set Base Design) to acquire TDS information, interpret it and integrate it.

Conference topics included the following the fundamentals of Toyota's Lean PD System.

• set base concurrent engineering
• expert engineering competence
• the project leadership system
• capturing re-usable engineering knowledge
• built-in continuous improvement
• focus on the customer value proposition

Presentations Highlights and Audience Comments

The presentation highlights and a sample of the 80 plus comments posted by the audience are as follows:

"Getting Started on a Leveled PD Process Flow Using Visual Tools and the Product Roadmap"
Speaker: Tom Johnson, P.E, Tennant Corporation, described the TDS product roadmap that staggers new product introductions to create leveled flow of its product development projects. Tom Johnson demonstrated the visual product roadmap that helps his firm respond to market changes, and develop flexible resources to implement the development projects. Tom showed the simple, visual communication tool that aligns senior management, marketing, manufacturing and product design; it provides a long term plan and shows when to start a development project. The product roadmap helps the firm guide advanced technology projects, manufacturing plant and production planning, marketing voice of the customer studies and product launches.

Audience Comments
"Keeping discipline is key to making the system work."
"I like the visual display of the Tennant roadmap."
"How do you ensure the PD org. has enough resources at the front end….?

"Integrating Toyota’s PD Process Flow ‘Thinking’ to Successfully Reduce Cycle Time"
Speaker: Gary R. Kassen, P.E. Eaton Hydraulics

Gary described a kaizen initiative to look at lean product development improvement opportunities. Development times were too long, design loopbacks were plentiful. Gary Kassen and the improvement team introduced set base design in a specific project and simultaneously start developing towering technical competence in all engineers. The result: more robust product designs, better alignment to customer wants/needs, reduced time to market, improved financial metrics, greater collaboration with supply chain and improved on -time delivery of NPD projects.

Audience Comments

"How much time is consumed in non value add activities?"
"Learning: be willing to challenge your current paradigms."

"Initiating a 4-2-1 Set Base Design Convergence Method"
Speaker: David Hein Nexen, Inc.
Dave Hein described his experiences in designing and implementing a compelling, simple Set Base Design and a concurrent prototype task method and design convergence system that centers on customer value expectations. He designed a customer "value distribution" tool that capture customer problems and needs in a prioritized bell shape curve that design engineers see, understand and focus their design solutions on. He described his set base design method that tasks four two engineer teams which simultaneously sketch out and prototype one solution in a time based effort (one week). The four solutions focus on the customer problem. Dave described his design convergence method in which the engineers evaluate each solution against the customer value distribution tool to finally select two and then the single solution to develop and launch.

Audience Comments

"set base focuses thinking about design choices early rather than loop back after tests."
"Excellent process to implement: I now understand it. I follow the logic; now it is time to act!"
"Simple to understand and implement."
"I like the added energy generated by the engineers who compete for the final design."
"I think set base design is a great concept; am a little unsure about implementation."
"Engineers would appreciate this very much: it allows a lot of creativity."
"I like the week limit on the design creation tasks."
"Customer focus helps add value."

"Selecting the Right Elements of the Toyota PD System and Integrating Them into the Product Development Organization’s Mainstream"
Speaker: Ramanujan S. Makram Eaton Hydraulics Corporation described the ways that Eaton aligns with customer expectations throughout their multi phase development process. He showed the tradeoff curves (Toyota's visible knowledge power) examples. He described the Obeya Visual method that an Eaton Advance design team discovered and uses like Toyota does to get cross functional teams aligned, decided and action oriented. The team productivity increased as a result.

Audience Comments

"Visual knowledge is obviously more valuable"
"I need to tie set base designs to VOC to maximize the value of the design activity."

"Developing Specialized Engineering Experts"
Speaker: David Klis
Director of Engineering
The Toro Company
Commercial Products Division

Toyota captures knowledge from real time, frequent "reflection events" that build the expertise and competence of engineers at the systems level and individual subsystem levels. Dave Klis presented his TDS initiatives: Toro's specialization groups, set base concurrent engineering and system designer entrepreneurial leaders (chief engineers).

Audience Comments
Stay the course; if anything, push harder!
"be willing to challenge current paradigms."

"Using Performance Curves in New Product Development"
Speaker: Merle Meyer
Vice President, Product Development
Katun Corporation

Toyota's engineering effectiveness depends on knowledge generated by performance curves of components and subsystems. This knowledge is used and re-used to save time at Toyota. Merle Meyer described his valuable initiative which helped Katun find and use existing product performance curves that saved development time by applying this knowledge to solve new "critical to function design factor" problems.

Audience Comments

"Sharing and using knowledge is more important than storing and managing the stored knowledge."
"Establish your learning process first."
"Critical to function is a very useful insight."

Keynote Addresses:

"Toyota's ‘Learning Focused’ PD System Elements and Thinking: Requirements for High Performance Product Development Organizations."

Speaker Michael N. Kennedy, author, recounted Toyota President's perspective: the secret of Toyota is very simple: respect and trust the people, keep everything simple, and make all knowledge visible. Mike showed the visual impact of the basic TDS: it is a system based on the relentless search for product knowledge and the ability to reuse that knowledge for generations of new products. He described the LAMDA (look, ask, model, discuss and act) cycle that is at the heart of Toyota's engineers' competence and knowledge generation.

"Toyota Development System: the fundamentals important to any PD system"
Speaker Durward Sobek II described what he saw when studying the TDS and people in Toyota City, Japan. The profit motive is the driver. The product developer creates value by learning and using knowledge for innovation, integration and good decisions. Thus seeing PD from a learning perspective changes everything! Test to learn, rather than test to validate. The TDS basics:

1. The object of TDS is to make profit, consistently.
2. The operation value stream generates the profit.
3. The rate and quality of output from development depend critically knowledge.
4. Grow people who can use, generate useful knowledge.
5. Manage the work flow to eliminate waste, instability, and overburden.


Audience Comments

"Our PD organization really needs to improve: the TDS system makes sense and can be learned."
"Seeing product development from a learning perspective, not from a development perspective: my key learning"
“How is knowledge used as inventory?"
"Wow: learning is what this is about."