Assuring Product Development Success Before Design ─ The Real Message from the Wright Brothers and Toyota

The concept of knowing a design will work early in a project (rather than after the production prototypes have been tested) and will satisfy the customers, such that projects essentially never fail, was first observed at Toyota (along with other measurable benefits). But the name the authors have given to that concept, "Success Assured," was born from a pair using those design practices over a century ago: the Wright Brothers. Before their first successful flight, despite that brilliant highly-qualified engineers all over the globe had been trying to achieve manned flight and consistently failing, the pair of bicycle shop owners with only a high school education had proven to themselves that they would succeed. Where did that confidence come from? Early in their design process, the Wright Brothers identified three key knowledge gaps that needed to be filled in order to design an airplane that you knew would work:

• "the construction of the sustaining wings."
• "the generation and application of the power required to drive the machine through the air."
• "the balancing and steering of the machine after it is actually in flight."

They then set about methodically learning the causal relationships between the different design decisions they needed to make and the performance of the airplane.

The key take-away from their story: the Wright Brothers fundamentally transformed the front end of development into a sharply-focused learning and decision-making process, and thereby eliminated the late-process rework in which their competition was stuck.

Toyota built an amazing manual product development system that was able to consistently create a cadence of high quality products that customers want – all orchestrated at Toyota City. Myriads of Lean principles, jargon, and tools have been introduced and applied with minimal impact on design loopbacks, engineering productivity, and knowledge reuse within small to midsize engineering companies – and almost no penetration within highly complex engineering companies. New paradigms must be discovered to relentlessly expose knowledge gaps and tradeoffs early and optimize results before detailed design begins. The result will ensure success early – not later after extensive firefighting and engineering rework. This book presents new thinking and methodologies to convert the chaotic front end of product development into a convergent process of set-based learning and continuously innovating – a game changer for Engineering.

Michael Kennedy

Michael had a 30 year career at Texas Instruments Inc., where he was the lead engineer on many development projects including missile system products and manufacturing systems. During his last years at TI, he was a leader in reengineering the core engineering and manufacturing processes, including adopting concurrent engineering, solid modeling CAD systems, CAD/CAM integration, and driving TI's quality initiatives, leading to TI's winning of the Malcolm Baldrige Award.

For the past 10 years, Michael has researched and applied the principles of Toyota’s outstanding product development system to dramatically improve companies’ productivity metrics. His first book, Product Development for the Lean Enterprise, explained the Toyota underlying philosophy for developing products. His second book, Ready, Set, Dominate, extends the learning into implementation strategies and discusses two case studies in mapping these methodologies to western companies. He is the co-founder and CEO of Targeted Convergence Corporation with the mission of developing models, training, and tools for implementing those principles into manufacturing companies.

Penny Cloft

Penny recently retired from Pratt & Whitney after 35 years. She started her career as a design engineer in the turbine airfoil design group where she gained experience in complex design and manufacturing processes. In the early 1990s she was part of the on site engineering team at P&W’s North Haven airfoil facility supporting the Lean transformation to just in time manufacturing. This transformation is described as the "acid test" for large companies with complex products in Jim Womack’s book Lean Thinking. The experience had a profound affect on Penny and led her to seek a position where she could apply her new found lean learning. Penny applied for and received the Durable Tooling manager position in Operations and used lean methods to significantly reduce tooling costs and lead-times.

In 2005, Penny returned to Engineering as the Systems Design manager. Again she applied her lean learning to the System Design and Configuration Management processes. Engineering change lead-times reduced by 50%. Also better visibility to engineering change status improved prioritization allowing P&W to meet or exceed committed change introduction dates to customers.

These successes led to executive requests to improve other important engineering processes including product development. Penny’s approach to improving P&W’s product development process was influenced by Michael Kennedy’s books. In 2011 she was promoted to Senior Fellow Discipline Lead for Systems Engineering. This gave her the ability to influence the other Discipline leads in engineering which was critical to transforming P&W’s development process. She led P&W’s product development process transformation from a strict phase gate process to a modified phase gate process with disciplined integration events to provide better focus on knowledge gaps early in the development process.