Managing Automation - February 2008 - (Page 21) supply chain, and the reason is culture,” says Dave Levine, executive vice president at LeanCor. “But the potential payoff is tremendous.” That’s how executives at Hayward Industries see it. Today, lean is baked into Hayward’s DNA, at least when it comes to processes on the plant floor. The company started its lean journey eight years ago and today conducts between 50 and 60 Kaizen events per year, mostly related to production processes. Eighteen months ago, however, Hayward officials decided to try to use lean techniques to remove waste from what managers were increasingly recognizing as a dysfunctional NPD process. Although Hayward had tried earlier to implement a phase gate approach to make product development processes more standard and predictable, “the phase gate manuals sat on shelves and were widely ignored,” says Paul Adelberg, vice president of lean technology at Hayward. As a result, Adelberg says, engineers often missed major steps in the product development process. That frequently led to costly delays, new products that were too costly to make or failed to meet market requirements, and high levels of new product returns. “The entire organization knew we needed to improve the new product development process,” Adelberg says. “People thought that by skipping steps in the process, they were speeding things up, but we were paying for it downstream big time.” So Hayward launched Kaizen and value stream mapping efforts to pinpoint waste in the NPD process. Lean teams decided that the “The potential in applying lean to sales and marketing is greater than in manufacturing.” — Sales Performance Consultants’ Michael Webb company needed to require that all NPD projects adhere to the phase gate process, meaning that a project could not proceed unless engineers could demonstrate that key tasks, such as market research and customer input, had been performed at the required stages. The company also beefed up the requirements at each stage. Under the old process, teams might be expected to get input from one or two customers before proceeding, but the new process required a full voice-of-thecustomer exercise, with input from as many as 60 customers. The new process also required a complete cost analysis at every phase. The net result, Adelberg says, is a much more standard, rigorous, and demanding process, and one that will weed out bad projects earlier and ensure that new products that reach the market meet customer reTOP BARRIER TO ADOPTION OR quirements for function EXPANSION OF LEAN STRATEGIES and cost. Within the next Significant culture change required outside the plant year, Adelberg says, Hay57% ward expects to reduce No straightforward way to quantify the business value of new product cycle times lean beyond the plant floor — which average 10 39% months to 12 months — by 30% to 40%. And a year Top management commitment after that, the company 35% expects to cut cycle times by more than 50%. Lack of participation by suppliers and other partners Despite Hayward’s high 35% hopes, some exper ts question whether most Operating practices and data standards differ significantly across trading partner community manufacturers will be 30% able to apply continuous process improvement Enterprise-level reorganization or consolidation that affects supply chain value streams methodologies such as 22% lean to NPD processes without endangering inSource: Aberdeen Group, August 2006 novation and creativity. Manufacturing Insights’ Parker notes that some people at NPD stalwart 3M have reportedly blamed Six Sigma for dragging down innovation. “There’s a fundamental difference between process improvement programs, like lean, which are continuous, and invention, which is discontinuous,” Parker says. “It’s hard to legislate and regulate the process of invention.” Adelberg answers that Hayward isn’t trying to apply lean principles to the creative parts of the product innovation process. Instead, he notes, Hayward is focusing lean on the parts of the process that follow new idea generation and involve translation of the idea into a product that can be manufactured and that customers will pay for. “There’s just a lot of waste there, and the potential for improvement is great,” he says. blocks road SOLD ON LEAN If lean seems a dubious fit with NPD processes, the idea of applying lean to sales and marketing might appear at first glance to be a complete non sequitur. Not only are sales processes discontinuous and difficult to visualize, but also, at many companies, they are largely undocumented. In fact, experts say, many sales professionals believe they are not accountable for the process, only the results. Still, some experts suggest lean can help to Photo courtesy: Sales Performance Consultants 21 February 2008
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.