Lean Product Development and PLM’s Supporting Role

Have been having discussions about Lean Product Development in various groups on LinkedIn (PDMA, PLM Group, etc). One of the important implications that has surprisingly not come up in the discussions is how different product development technologies support Lean. To explore this point for this post I have taken excerpts from our Lean Product Development and PLM white paper.

The role of many software technologies in product development is analogous to that of machine tool automation in manufacturing. Individual tools such as CAD software and simulation tools optimize individual operations without regard to the overall process of product development. Many different functions and activities are required to bring new products to market quickly. Coordination and synchronization must be achieved across design engineering, quality engineering, product test engineering, manufacturing engineering, supply chain & procurement, marketing, and sales. Speeding up a select handful of operations can actually be counterproductive to overall process efficiency causing waste and actually resulting in cycle time increases.

To effectively implement Lean in product development a company needs to focus on the overall process. Point applications and tools are unable to support the necessary process aspects required due to limited scope and an inability to manage complex business processes. Because the location of participants in the product development process is increasingly geographically distributed, whether across town or around the globe, companies need collaboration technology to communicate effectively.

Enterprise PLM software solutions support business processes like product development project management and revision change control workflows which play an essential role in enabling Lean in product development. For an enterprise PLM system to do a good job supporting Lean requires some specific aspects:

Process Structure – Ability to define product development phases and deliverables in formats that accommodate the many complexities of the business

Visual Management – Ability to see the progress and status of new products as they move through development with dashboards to eliminating waste due to misinformation and duplication of tasks

Knowledge Management – Ability to capture, store, sort, and easily retrieve product information in a comprehensive context to avoid mistakes and achieve process coordination

Process Flexibility – Ability to easily modify business processes and information relationships to quickly adapt to business conditions

Internet Based – Web-based enterprise PLM software enables communication, collaboration, and coordination without the limitations inherent in client-server systems

One of the biggest obstacles to successfully implementing Lean in product development is the inherent programming complexity involved in the rigid nature of ERP and conventional PDM systems. A PLM solution must be easily adapted to support continuous improvement and process innovations which are at the heart of Lean.

What’s your take? Can your company get Lean in product development? Or will your PLM system stand in the way?

Also, a couple of books that I thought were pretty good regarding Product Development and Lean, more specifically what I refer to as Lean Design, are:

The Toyota Product Development System by Jeffrey Liker (provides a fairly in-depth explanation of the specific design methodologies used by Toyota)

Product Development for the Lean Enterprise by Michael Kennedy (provides a good general overview of the Toyota product development concepts)