C O N F E R E N C E
Fast and
Flexible Product Development
October 8-10, 2003
/ Chicago, IL |
PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS
Workshop A - 8:00am - 12:00pm
Using Front-Loaded
Prototyping for Faster Learning, Better Decision-Making and
Compelling Products
Prototypes have always been a part of product development –
often a decision-making tool for product developers. Yet they
have been too few, too infrequent, and too late to be central to
the decision making process – key decisions were already made by
the time they appeared, and prototypes simply confirmed the
direction of a product.
Today’s prototyping
technologies permit earlier, faster and cheaper
prototypes – feedback from these more frequent prototypes can
now illuminate development decisions as they are being made.
Smart prototyping also makes it easier to draw into the decision
process
those who cannot read engineering drawings (marketing and sales
professionals, finance specialists, suppliers, and customers)
and take advantage of their insights and guidance.
This workshop will explore this
new—much more valuable—role for prototypes. We will learn how:
- a sequence of decisions forms
the core of product development
- these decisions can be
facilitated by timely, just-adequate prototypes
- you can adjust your
development process and mindset to exploit this new way of
developing products
|
Instructor:  Preston
G. Smith
New Product Dynamics
Preston has worked exclusively on
accelerated product development for over ten years. He founded
New Product Dynamics in 1986 to bring rapid development
expertise to a wide variety of companies as an independent
consultant.
In addition to publishing
numerous articles on the techniques of speeding up product
development, Preston is author (with Donald Reinersten) of
Developing Products in Half the Time, published by Van
Norstrand Reinhold. Preston's most recent book is Proactive
Risk Management: Controlling Uncertainty in Product Development,
co-authored with Guy Merritt and published by Productivity
Press.
Related Articles
by Preston Smith:
|
|
Workshop B - 8:00am - 5:00pm
Achieving Flexibility
with Lean Product Development
Making a development process more flexible requires changing the
way we think about product development. Some of the techniques
that are now called "lean principles" have had a profound impact
on the flexibility of our manufacturing processes. Plants that
used to quote lead-times measured in months now quote lead-times
in days. Changeovers that once took hours now take minutes.
With some careful adaptation, these same
techniques can be applied to our product development processes.
We can dramatically reduce "Design in Process Inventory",
decrease batch sizes, shrink queues, and smooth flow. Lessons
learned on the manufacturing floor can be applied in product
development as long as we respect the important differences
between product development and manufacturing. Manufacturing is
repetitive, low uncertainty, bounded, and linear. Product
development is non-repetitive, high uncertainty, unbounded, and
non-linear.
This workshop shows participants how to
apply several important lean tools to their product development
process. Many manufacturing applications of lean tools focus on
waste reduction. However, for product developers there is far
more economic leverage in using these tools to increase
flexibility. This one-day seminar is narrowly focused on
using lean tools to increase development process flexibility.
Through experiential exercises, lectures
and facilitated Q&A, you will learn how to:
- Smooth flow in your product development
process
- Increase the flexibility of development
resources
- Analyze queues and troubleshoot their
causes
- Unlock the power of small batch sizes
- Determine the financial impact of these
changes
|
Instructor:  Don
Reinertsen
Reinertsen &
Associates,
Author of Managing the Design Factory and co-author,
Developing Products in Half the Time
Don Reinertsen is President
of Reinertsen & Associates, specializing in the management of
the product development process. Before forming his own firm he
consulted at McKinsey & Co., an international, management
consulting firm, and was Senior Vice President of operations at
Zimmerman Holdings, a private diversified manufacturing company.
His contributions in the field of product development have been
recognized internationally. He is particularly noted for
bringing fresh perspectives and quantitative rigor to
development process management.
In 1983, while a consultant
at McKinsey & Co. he wrote a landmark article in Electronic
Business magazine that first quantified the value of
development speed. This article has been cited as the frequently
quoted McKinsey study that indicated "6 months delay can be
worth 33 percent of life cycle profits." He coined the term
"Fuzzy Front End" in 1983, began applying world class
manufacturing techniques in product development in 1985. His
latest book, Managing the Design Factory, is recognized
as a powerful and thoughtful application of manufacturing
thinking to product development.
Don is also co-author of,
Developing Products in Half the Time. He teaches a popular
executive course at Cal Tech, called Streamlining the Product
Development Process. Mr. Reinertsen holds a B.S. in
Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and an M.B.A.
with distinction from Harvard Business School.
Related Articles
by Don Reinertsen:
|
|
Workshop C - 1:00pm - 5:00pm
10X Development:
Creating Order of Magnitude Products from Fuzzy Market
Requirements
Modern-day Product Development is distinguished by vastly
compressed time frames, constant multi-functional interactions
and significant process flexibility. Process alone is no longer
enough to guarantee successful product launches. Improvements in
development tools and techniques can only deliver marginal
benefits to highly constrained development processes with little
"slack" left in the system. Understanding how your customer’s
think & choose, how your competition will behave and how your
development team interacts is increasingly fetching a higher
fraction of the returns in the development process. Winning
teams must integrate these dynamics
with the proper tools & techniques to optimize their
chances for successful launches.
The high uncertainty of today’s markets combined
with the constant evolution of technologies has created an
environment where getting the product right involves more
than integrating the Voice of the Customer. This new era
involves embracing
fuzzy market requirements, delaying technical
specifications and integrating
continuous comprehensive testing. To do this requires a system
that can deliver more than one or two incremental customer
improvements, but deliver products that dwarf the competition.
10X Development
will show you how to chart a path to creating products that
eclipse your competition by employing the concept of order of
magnitude. This system involves studying, identifying and
experimenting in an iterative way to determine the ten highest
benefits to your customer group. Concurrently, this method
forces the human dynamics of the development process to deliver
products that can compete as best-of-class
offerings at several levels. By creating products designed to
deliver these multiple benefits, differentiation in the
marketplace is increased ten-fold. |
Instructor:
David Roach
President
Produxys Solutions
David C. Roach, MBA, P.Eng.
brings 20 years of experience in the area of innovation
management & entrepreneurship, specializing in the field of
Product & Process innovation. Some career highlights include
seed capital financing & technology commercialization with
InNOVAcorp, manufacturing & quality engineering with General
Motors of Canada Ltd., and product design, development and
marketing with Navitrak International Corporation. Academically,
Mr. Roach brings a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering
and an MBA from Dalhousie University with concentration in
International Business and Marketing. His training also includes
executive level courses at such institutes as Harvard Business
School (Leading Product Development) and Kellogg Graduate School
of Management (e-business). Recent presentations include
Managing the Virtual Product Development Organization,
Genesis of a New Product and Flexibility by Design
for the Management Roundtable (Waltham, MA). He lectures at the
graduate level in Marketing Technology Products, New Product
Development and New Venture Creation at Dalhousie University. He
also delivers executive business courses internationally in
Managing Product Innovation and Marketing. Mr. Roach has been
instrumental in many start-up and early stage companies
including the ORB Factory Ltd., a company specializing in
transformational novelty products, as a director in
Environmental Packaging Systems Ltd., a company specializing in
transportation services for pharmaceutical clinical trials and
Director Handheld Systems for Navitrak International Corporation
(TSX: YNK), a publicly traded company specializing in commercial
GPS and mapping products. Mr. Roach maintains his own consulting
company Produxys Solutions Inc., specializing in product
innovation and life cycle management |
|
|
|
