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

Savvy Consortium© presents Lean Product Development Conference VII. This seventh Savvy Conference focuses on implementing product innovation, design and development tools and methods.

This Savvy Conference VII and its knowledge content is provided by product engineering managers, from a variety of industries, presenting their experiences implementing engineering tools and practices based on Toyota’s Product Design Engineering Development System.

The Savvy Consortium calls this Knowledge Based Product Development.

HOT TOPIC! The engineering manager presenters will give their insights on how their customer needs, problems and practice are changing in this uncertain economy. They will describe the main impact of changing customer expectations: “back to basics” design engineering.

New in 2009! Savvy Consortium© Lean Product Development Conference VII presents in-depth understanding of the Chief Engineer a basic pillar of lean product development systems. Allen Ward calls it the "Entrepreneurial System Designer". Toyota uses chief engineers to lead their development organizations and thereby make their schedules, eliminate risk and rapidly apply engineering knowledge in product design decisions that satisfy customer expectations.

At this Savvy Conference, five chief engineers and one technology development program leader from the Savvy Consortium will present their product focused work practices. They will show how they engage their development teams. They will describe their basic tasks: how they use technical knowledge for timely product design decisions that meet shorter schedules; how they build towering engineering competence/ productivity; and how they meet customer value expectations. The technical skills, product focus, leadership character, and work ethic of these chief engineer individuals do engage their team colleagues. They do transform into high performance, schedule meeting, robust design knowledge generating teams.

Confirmed Speakers:

October 7 - Conference Day 1 “Knowledge Wins”

2006 – 2009 Continuing Legacy In the tradition of previous Savvy conferences, a variety of engineering managers from firms large and small will present their implementation of the fundamentals found in a growing number of organizations and based on the Toyota Lean Product Development System. As implemented in the USA, it is becoming known as the “Knowledge Based” Product Innovation, Design and Development System or “K based.”

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 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.

October 8 - Conference Day 2
“Chief Engineer Leads”

Savvy Consortium© Conference VII differentiates by offering superior knowledge value. The value stems from high performance engineering managers, more valuable content and timely practical information that has been building from multi--year implementation of knowledge based lean product development. Savvy’s mission is to offer content variety, knowledge quality and quantity in this expanded two day conference event.

1. The Savvy speakers are multi-task engineering managers: reducing time to market, reducing project risks, increasing team productivity and improving product quality that increasingly satisfies their customers.

2. The Savvy speakers are simultaneously transforming their organizations to “knowledge based” product development systems. They have compared their practices with Toyota’s design and development system, practices and foundations. They focus on improving customer knowledge, set based design concurrent engineering, technical knowledge pull/push flow, engineering knowledge worker excellence, rigorous problem solving and the chief engineer leadership model.

3. The Savvy speakers’ are reducing waste and eliminating non value-added practices that slow down harried knowledge workers struggling to perform their tasks and meet schedules.

4. Savvy Conference VII offers “current experience” knowledge from a greater number and variety of engineering managers-speakers compared to other conference.

5. The Savvy speaker content is better focused on valuable and practical knowledge you can implement. Savvy speakers present their practical experiences to generate discussion. They show documents and tools. They explain their step by step practices and the thinking behind them.

6. The Savvy Consortium speakers are convinced that their “knowledge based product development system” can be learned and integrated in existing organizations that use gated development processes and tools.

Conclusion Transforming to knowledge based product development is a must for USA companies to compete for 21st Century global markets.

Attending this Savvy Consortium conference will how you can accelerate your transformation or initiate it. Much learning and implementation effort is needed. The knowledge you get at this Savvy Conference generates energy to move forward and transform/improve product design, innovation and development results. You will have the confidence that you can do it by seeing and meeting individuals who are doing it successfully.

Development project leaders will profit from the chief engineers experiences. New product design engineering and new product leaders, managers, supervisors, development team members, test engineers, design engineers, new product marketing, product planning individuals, market researchers, heavyweight development project managers, continuous improvement experts, green belts, black belts, business excellence people, value stream managers and any individual with responsibility for product innovation, design and development will generate a list of action tasks that will start to payoff immediately.

The Savvy Consortium speakers invite you to register now for this unique conference. Plan to immerse yourself in the knowledge content materials. Plan to meet and interact with the speakers and many other product developers who are moving ahead in their initiatives to transform their product development people, processes, and practices.

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