One of the risk averse ripostes to new product (and service) design ideas is "that sounds really good but we are already late if we are going to launch in just over 15 month's from now. We can't try anything oddball because if we are wrong we're stuffed!".
One approach we successfully adopted was to look at how we could speed up the design process to enable us to play (seriously) with more options. Pure speed (shortening the overall time to market) can of course be achieved by more effort, but without changing the game we play it will mean getting to market with a mediocre idea faster!
A better approach is to speed up the rate of iteration. By adopting new appraoches and technologies it is often relatively easy to slice significant time off individual activities~ I always aim for at least 30% declared reductions... so ten days becomes a week and so on. Without behaviour change by all the participants in a project (the so-called stakeholders) this time will be squandered so we have to enter into deals... "Are you around on Friday? Good, because we will have something interesting to show you."
We originally tried this many years ago when we moved fron a mini-based CAD setup with 4 workstations on a Vax to having one dumb workstation replaced with one of the first VAXStaions. At the time we were creating product toolpaths at about 2 hours per iteration, taking 2-5 days to completely describe all external surfaces. We then milled a model from CIBAtool "grainless wood" in another 2-5 days; we would tell people 2 weeks from a decision to tweak the external shape to having a sprayed up model for discussion. This also gave us two weekends to correct any monumental "SNAFUS".
With the worksation installed we found the 2 hours per iteration became 8-10 minutes! This meant we could spend more iterations getting shorter toolpaths which speeded up the machining time. We used this "Iterative Capital" in several ways. We experimented with tool feeds and speeds and found we could rip off material at ten times the speed, at the expense of tool wear. We then went for roughing and finishing toolpaths with a tool change between; looked for different tool geometries to optimise for the task and before we knew it we could achieve turnaround times of 2 or three days... this changed the perspective of the whole team and we found ourselves out of the office more as we delivered models to meeting all over Europe... Why not Fedex? Well at the time some services were not that quick in certain European countries, so we needed to "get on our bikes" to ensure a reliable service...... This had an unexpected consequence. We could get instant feedback from the people as well as discussion of what could be done to improve. On return to the office this meant we could get on with the next iteration.
This eventually led to a M>W>D approach to process improvement which I will discuss in a separate blog.
Why wheelspin and IC? Well If we only look at speeding up overall we can give the impression of speed in activities but if our actions don't change we can just spin our wheels without moving forwards. IC is Iterative Capital and the accumulation of this very valuable asset and its wise use is a key Insight that led to M>W>D. More soon!
It's the orginal i admit it.
Posted by: cash for gold | April 13, 2011 at 09:18 AM