Visible Knowledge for Flawless Design: The Secret Behind Lean Product Development

116 Pages·2018·4.02 MB·English

by  Allen C Ward

Visible Knowledge for
Flawless Designs

Visible Knowledge for
Flawless Designs
The Secret behind Lean Product
Development
By
Allen C. Ward
With Contributions by
Dantar P. Oosterwal
Durward K. Sobek II
A PRODUCTIVITY PRESS BOOK
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
© 2018 by Allen C. Ward with contributions from Dantar P. Oosterwal and Durward K. Sobek II
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Contents
Foreword: How This Book Came to Be .......................................................vii
Preface: What You’ll Learn .............................................................................xi
Acknowledgments .........................................................................................xiii
About the Authors ..........................................................................................xv
1 How and Why to Use Visible Knowledge ...........................................1
What Is Visible Knowledge? ..............................................................................2
The Basic Concept .............................................................................................5
How Visible Knowledge Changes the Development Process ..........................8
The Wright Brothers, “Understand Then Design,” and the P-51 ....................10
The Efficiency of Visible Knowledge ...............................................................14
The Problem ..................................................................................................14
Overcoming the Objections .............................................................................21
Reference ..........................................................................................................22
2 How to Create Visible Knowledge ...................................................23
Choosing the Issues to Investigate ..................................................................24
How We’ll Approach the Problem ...................................................................24
Step 1: State the Issue ..................................................................................26
Step 2: Draw a Picture .................................................................................28
Step 3: Create a Causal Diagram .................................................................30
Substep A ..................................................................................................32
Substep B ..................................................................................................33
Substep C ..................................................................................................34
Substep D .................................................................................................34
Substep E ..................................................................................................35
Step 4: Finding Data and Creating Curves ..................................................38
Substep A ..................................................................................................40
Substep B ..................................................................................................40
Substep C ..................................................................................................42
Substep D .................................................................................................48
Step 5: Countermeasures .............................................................................53
v
vi ◾ Contents
3 Visible Knowledge and Companies ..................................................59
Organizing Your Knowledge ...........................................................................59
Changing Management Roles and Skills .........................................................62
Making Sure Your People Create Visible Knowledge .....................................63
Conducting Effective Design Reviews .............................................................64
Changing Your Development Process .............................................................65
Changing the Research Organization ...............................................................67
Changing Supplier Relationships ......................................................................67
Changing the Test Organization ......................................................................68
Conclusion: Better, Faster, Cheaper .................................................................69
4 Applying Visible Knowledge ............................................................ 71
Establish a Visible Knowledge Mindset ..........................................................72
Summary ......................................................................................................75
Alternative Ways of Building Visible Knowledge ...........................................76
Leveraging Existing Data .............................................................................76
Tapping the Experience of Seasoned Employees .......................................77
Using Designed Experiments .......................................................................79
Use Visible Knowledge to Enhance Cross-Functional Collaboration.............82
Presentation Is Important ................................................................................87
Leading the Change .........................................................................................90
The Journey Is Just Begun ...............................................................................94
Index ......................................................................................................97
Foreword: How This Book
Came to Be
The year 2003 was the hundredth anniversary for the Harley-Davidson Motor
Company. As the director of product development, Dantar Oosterwal faced the
challenge of delivering on a promise of double-digit growth Harley-Davidson
had made to the street, and he did not know how to do it. For many years, the
demand for Harley-Davidson motorcycles far exceeded their ability to supply
them. At the peak, customers waited nearly 24 months to buy certain models.
The company’s greatest focus at that time was eliminating bottlenecks in manu-
facturing and logistics to get motorcycles out of the factory to waiting customers.
The only motorcycles on the floor of a dealership seemed to be those waiting to
be picked up or used bikes from trade-in. In the 1990s, Harley-Davidson invested
heavily in operations, doubling its manufacturing footprint in an effort to address
the supply issue. This investment resulted in record revenue and profits every
quarter as Harley-Davidson broke production constraints and shipped increas-
ingly more motorcycles to fill demand. At first, the incredible demand seemed
insatiable, and the growth promised to the street seemed sustainable. However, a
deeper look behind the numbers revealed that the increased product shipments
had eroded pent-up demand. By the early 2000s, the wait times for motorcycles
had dropped dramatically with the wait lists virtually eliminated, reflecting a sig-
nificant shift in the ratio of product demand to supply.
The “demand/supply” ratio is a crucial metric used for product planning and
an integral part of a system dynamics model of the motorcycle industry cre-
ated to evaluate various business and industry scenarios for decision-making. As
the ratio dropped, the model provided a tool to evaluate ways to increase the
demand/supply ratio. The alternatives evaluated ranged from reducing supply,
to traditional pricing and marketing plays, to increased product innovation. The
model identified several actions that could provide short-term demand/supply
ratio improvements, such as pricing. The analysis also identified that the only
meaningful and effective way to achieve sustainable revenue and profit growth
was through increasing the introduction rate of new products. The dilemma was
figuring out how to increase new product development throughput to drive the
double-digit growth that had been committed.
vii
viii ◾ Foreword: How This Book Came to Be
Compounding the situation, Harley-Davidson had focused for several years
on creating and instituting a systematic product development process based on
Stage-Gate methods. The company implemented the approach well—so well, in
fact, that the Product Development Management Association (PDMA) awarded
the company the Outstanding Corporate Innovator award in 2003. Despite being
identified as among the best at utilizing conventional methods, it was clear that
making conventional development methods a little (or even a lot) better would
not lead to the drastic increase in development throughput they needed. Dantar
concluded that Harley-Davidson needed to learn a better way of developing
products.
The quest for more effective approaches led them to Jim Womack who was
then the CEO of the Lean Enterprise Institute and an internationally recognized
expert in lean operations within companies. With the effectiveness that lean
methods had demonstrated in operations improvement, the thought of using lean
manufacturing methods to improve the product development system was very
appealing. However, Jim was adamant that lean product development was very
different from lean manufacturing, and that product development needed to
be approached very differently. When asked how product development should
be addressed, he did not have an answer, but suggested Dr. Allen Ward who
was studying lean product development methods at the University of Michigan
at the time. This was the beginning of a relationship that proved instrumen-
tal in the changes at Harley-Davidson and led to a much better way of product
development.
The first contact with Allen was not encouraging. He had become reticent to
work with companies out of the frustration he had endured in trying to get orga-
nizations to change the way they worked. Over a series of conversations, Allen
warmed to the relationship and realized that Harley-Davidson may be different
as he eventually agreed to be a mentor in the effort to change product develop-
ment. The work resulted in a close relationship as Allen provided insight to the
lean development methods he studied at the University of Michigan, and Harley-
Davidson strived to apply this in real-world applications. Both sides learned and
grew through the experience. Few people understood lean product development
like Allen did. He was able to not just observe and communicate what Toyota
did, but he had an infectious enthusiasm and insight into why things worked.
This enabled Harley-Davidson to adapt principles to Western work practices
and institute lean product development at one of the most iconic American
companies.
Tragically, Dr. Ward passed away when the plane he was piloting crashed
during a thunderstorm. Following Allen’s untimely death, Dantar reached out
for guidance to Dr. Durward Sobek, who had studied under Allen while he
had been a PhD student at the University of Michigan. The combined efforts at
Harley-Davidson were very successful. By 2006, Harley-Davidson had realized
nearly a five-fold increase in new product throughput over 2003 and the previous
15-year trend with the same people.
Foreword: How This Book Came to Be ◾ ix
This book has evolved out of a manuscript that Allen was writing at the time
he passed away. It is not intended to be a treatise of lean product development
methods. Quite the opposite—it is focused on one small piece, “visible knowl-
edge.” However, it is one technique that we have found to be very effective at
Harley-Davidson and other places, and a tool that can make a difference whether
used by itself or as a starting point for a larger journey into lean product devel-
opment. In fact, Allen claimed that trade-off curves (visible knowledge) is the
most powerful lean tool he encountered.
In completing this work, we have tried to keep the manuscript true to Allen’s
original intent. The preface and first three chapters are essentially Allen’s original
intellectual contribution. We have made editorial changes to improve readability
and clarity of explanation to make the manuscript publication-ready. Throughout,
we have attempted to preserve Allen’s voice in the writing, even keeping the
narrative in first person as it was originally written. We had to recreate most of
the figures because we did not have the original electronic files, and we took
the opportunity to make some enhancements and corrections. Most notable of
those enhancements are an expanded introduction in Chapter 1 and the trade-off
curve sheet template presented in Chapter 2 where we have adapted the tem-
plate based on more recent work on A3 reports. Thus, Chapters 1 through 3 are
Allen’s work with minor modifications compiled to complete the text.
However, we felt that the manuscript was incomplete because Allen was still
working on it at the time of his death. We also felt that much more could have
been said because our understanding of visible knowledge had expanded in the
years since, especially in its application within actual company contexts. So, we
added a fourth chapter that was not in the original manuscript with the idea of
filling in a few gaps and providing practical examples of applying the concepts
or implementing them in practice. You may notice a change in voice in Chapter 4
as we shift from Allen’s original contribution to our own experiences and learn-
ing. Hopefully, you will find this added content equally interesting and perhaps
just as useful.
We are indebted to Allen for his depth of insight and intellectual capacity,
and are privileged to present this “secret” behind lean product development. Our
intent in publishing this book is to share a tool that can help you improve the
output of your product development system and achieve dramatic gains in your
competitive status. May you do so and more, and please visit www.developlean
.com to let us know how you have used visible knowledge to create flawless
designs.
—Dantar Oosterwal
Kalamazoo, MI
—Durward K. Sobek II
Bozeman, MT