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
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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:
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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
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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:
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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 |
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