Lean Management Symposium

“MANAGING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN 2009"

Thursday December 17, 2009 - Minneapolis

Savvy is a consortium of product development engineering leaders. Savvy offers a timely symposium for product development engineering leaders to address the questions:

How are product development engineering leaders getting their arms around this economic uncertainty? What tools are they implementing? What initiatives do they have underway to:
1. Implement product cost reductions for long-term financial viability.

2. Eliminate waste in order to do meet schedules with fewer resources and constrained budgets.

3. Continuously engage technical knowledge workers to improve their performance quality.

4. Ensure continued flow in the product development pipeline.

5. Implement “Knowledge based” lean product development.

This is a “must attend” symposium for individuals who do want to benchmark the initiatives of others. Leaders know that they cannot engage their people, projects and processes in isolation given the uncertainty.

Plan to get answers and implement useful knowledge about how others address changing management expectations, customer value expectations and simultaneously implement change.

The symposium content will draw on the results of the Savvy Chicago symposium in March.

Savvy Symposium
Thursday December 17, 2009 2:30-5:00 PM
Symposium Cost: $40.00
Register


Lean Product Development Conference VII
“Knowledge Wins - Chief Engineer Leads”
October 7-8, 2009 Minneapolis

“Product Development as a Knowledge Factory: A paradigm of a basic, knowledge creation system”

Todd Stute - Program Manager, Corporate Quality - Seagate Corporation
Product development leadership is under tremendous pressure to generate new products as sources of revenue and profitability while dealing with a shrinking resource base (due to layoffs), ever-changing customer requirements and market expectations for faster time-to-market cycles.

According to the late Dr. Allen Ward, the purpose of a product development process is to transform organizational knowledge into operational value streams that can efficiently deliver products and services to customers. Vital to this task, scientific information and engineering knowledge are the basic building blocks for product development. In his presentation, Todd will introduce a simple visual paradigm of a knowledge factory, a product development system built upon knowledge generation and flow.

Since knowledge factories are analogous to their operational brethren, Todd will demonstrate how standard Lean practices currently used for operational communication, work flow and resource management also have direct application within a development environment.

The presentation will cover both the theoretical underpinnings as well as practical results from the real-life application of A3’s, integrating events, glass walls, theory of constraints and value-added analysis in engineering environments. Todd will also introduce a system of management behaviors that encourage engineers and scientists to take responsibility for continuous improvement.

Event content, presentation materials and presenters may change without notice, but with intent to maintain or increase quality and relevance.