Customer Reviews

Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota's System is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It

5 star:		(9)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Michael Kennedy's book, Product Development for the Lean Enterprise, gives an experienced insight into the dilemma faced by some of North America's largest organizations, those who have embraced management science in all of its complexity to win national awards, only to find they are unable to compete successfully at the customer level. Using an engaging fictional narrative, Kennedy provides a fresh insight into product development; this book will challenge your beliefs and understanding and likely intrigue you sufficiently to investigate how aspects of the process can be made applicable in your enterprise. It is a treasure trove of information on, not just its principal topic, Toyota's unique product development process, but details on establishing and operating "a process renewal team" and "large group interventions for organizational change".

In Michael Kennedy's very readable book, one is introduced to Toyota's design concepts, unconventional to the majority of us in corporate North America. Imagine your product development process stipulating:
* explore not one, but multiple design solutions at the same time;
* delay the design's narrowing process to as late as possible in the process;
* demand the building and testing of multiple design models and prototypes for performance conformity;
* have the development, retention and reuse of engineering knowledge and skills a top priority for the company;
* eliminate the use of complex integrated task based program and plans by delegating each program designer to prepare his/her own time-lines to meet fixed review dates and performance levels; and
* have functional engineering managers focus on teaching and mentoring engineering talent, not administration.

In addition to product development, Kennedy's book gives the reader an overview of change management issues from strategy, to personal and political conflict, to presentation and implementation tactics. The book stimulates thought; it proposes possibilities; it gives a glimpse into the future of an enlightened company's product development process. It is beyond a wake-up-call; it is mental nourishment to everyone whose enterprise relies on engineered products.

What a wonderful read! I actually felt excited while reading it; it kept me up until 2:30am to finish in a single sitting. The format alternates between a chapter of fictional story, and a chapter of the author's commentary on the story and how it applies to the broader picture.

This is one of the few emerging practical books that discusses solutions to the productivity of knowledge workers. Drucker would be proud, I think. Businesses that manage engineers, artists, or product designers tend to be based on the original theory of management: Frederick Taylor's. This approach is largely based on manual labour -- making and moving things. Knowledge work isn't like that. You can't make knowledge workers productive by directing them, because by definition they will have more specialized knowledge about their contribution than you, as a manager, ever will!

Lean thinking really is about recognizing this "third wave" of management: first, there was task analysis. Then, we focused on business process engineering. Now, we look specifically at knowledge and value creation.

Lean thinking at its core is only 4 principles: add nothing but value (eliminate waste), center on the people who add value, flow value from demand (defer decisions), and optimize across the organization.

This book explains these principles as applied to product development -- which is quite different than lean production.
It really should have the same business impact that Goldratt's THE GOAL had back in the 1980's, if more would take notice.

Thumbs up, but I'd recommend you attend his workshops over the book if the opportunity presents itself.

The book is written as a fictional account of a company's journey from process hell to an environment where engineers can devote themselves more completely to the craft they love. It is complete with protagonists and antagonists. The many men and women who have devoted large portions of their careers to wrestling with new product development process issues and trying to improve the quality and efficiency of product development processes may justifiably take offense at being cast as the antagonist, but it wouldn't be much of a story without the villains.

The book raises some very good issues and points out some very good practices that have contributed to Toyota's success. Toyota's design philosophy is optimized for lowest possible risk to model year goals. American management teams would do well to think about optimizing for low risk instead of highest efficiency and lowest development cost. For many companies the cost of developing a new product is a fairly modest portion of their overall cost structure and the price they pay for missing new product introduction dates is far greater than the gains from tailoring their internal processes for the lowest cost development.

The implementation of highly redundant development paths (called sets in the book) will be far less revolutionary than the book would have you believe. It really comes down to a willingness and ability to make the necessary investments. Readers who have studied Japanese companies will find much that is familiar. Publicly held Japanese companies are far less driven by quarterly results than are their American counter parts. Japanese companies typically have few (if any) small stockholders looking for short term gains. The largest stock holders in a Japanese company are often other Japanese companies. They tend to set long term strategic goals e.g. to dominate the world car industry in 5 years. While these businesses must make money to sustain themselves they are content with smaller earnings than their American counterparts making it possible to re-invest larger portions of their revenues back into the company. Some of that reinvestment shows up as investment in engineering work that reduces risk to new product introduction dates. But make no mistake about it, there are no miracle cures. During the initial stages of introducing a risk adverse strategy you are getting less (new features) with more (investment), but on time, likely with better quality, and you can build economically on that investment for a future stream of new products.

Efficiency can be a huge problem, but not always. In many organizations engineering efficiency is disappointingly low. The book tries to make the case that Toyota's engineers are 4X more productive than the engineers of the fictitious company in the book (approx. 80% productive compared to ITRs 20%). The measure of productivity is not explained, but it is implied that it is simply the number of hours/week that engineers spend engineering instead of (presumably) unnecessary process compliance. It is unlikely that Toyota's engineers are on average really 4X more productive than the best of American engineering teams. A comparison between Toyota's engineering and one of America's best is probably a better comparison than a fictitious engineering team. The book does not sight any objective evidence for the 4X claim. Although few companies share their productivity numbers, 65% is a widely accepted number for staff utilization. If Toyota's staff utilization really is 80% then that would put them about 1.23X more productive. In actual fact productivity is far more complex to measure and since it is so complex many observers chose a metric and then measure changes rather than focus on an absolute #. Lack of evidence aside, the book does highlight some interesting opportunities for improvement in the area of knowledge retention and reuse.

I have no doubt that there are companies whose developers are 20% productive. Lack of stability in the organization is certainly a contributor. The ineptitude and unending churn of engineering management teams is a frequent cause. Many companies have suffered at the hands of corporate management teams looking for quick fixes to the perception that their projects take too long, cost too much, and fail too often. They are often executives who have no engineering experience and no way to objectively assess the performance of their teams. They are driven by fear and uncertainty. They have often set goals that are hopelessly impossible to begin with. The result from the engineer's perspective is an unending stream of organizational change meetings to roll out the new engineering management team, introduce their dramatic new ideas, and get the teams trained. This is immediately followed by or coupled with a call to heroic self-sacrifice in an effort to meet the hopeless goal with the new structure. Sound familiar? If you we're drawn to this book it probably does.

The first thing that any student of Japanese industry learns is its strong reliance on life-time employment. While there has been some decline in longevity in recent years it remains the expectation for most Japanese employees entering the workforce. The long-term expectations and thorough understanding of the company and its markets which the most senior managers obtain during their long careers fosters more emphasis on incremental improvement rather than radical re-birth. Either strategy can work, but the highest probability of long-term success is with the incremental improvement paradigm.

Mr. Kennedy is a joy to talk to with a refreshing directness and wealth of experience. The book has a "sensational" tone, but you'd expect that in a work that was intended to get your attention and interest. The advice he offers in person is well reasoned and sound. Well worth the price of admission.

This book lays out the "right stuff" for productive product development: the right culture, the right tools, the right process, etc. With all the current focus on centralization, controls, and program management offices what a refreshing look at what is really necessary to be successful in product development. Having worked 15 years in this field making this change happen and improving productivity (no really improve it), I can tell you that Michael Kennedy is on target. And, no, it isn't complex centralized task management processes and detailed centralized resource planning systems that require small armies of program management office bureaucrats put in place to control people. It is the people themselves. It is their knowledge and the use of the right process and tools that enables that knowledge that really counts. Personally, with all the junk out there today on controls systems, centralized project management, resource management and other approaches, and after being at another conference preaching this junk in the Pharmaceuctical industry (and where is their productivity at?) And recognizing that this junk really doesn't work, it is great to read a book that shows what does work. If you want your organization to really be successful in product development (no really successful in product development), don't read and listen to the junk coming out of PMI and the related consultants that purport to have the solution, which has no proof that it works in product development (only in the construction industry), read this instead. And, then work hard to make it happen in your company, with patience and perseverance - the right stuff!

Everything written is a bullseye with the exception of glaring ignorance regarding Six Sigma - what it is and isn't. What is written relative to Lean here should be taken verbatim as applying to Six Sigma also - there is no difference. Similarly, the written characterizations of Six Sigma should be ignored. To quote Senji Nihwa, Taiichi Ohno's lieutenant at Toyota for decades, in a good-natured ribbing, "You Americans, always trying to categorize things. Call it Lean, call it Six Sigma, it makes no difference to us...it's all the same." And so it is.

The book is extremely well written and accurate with the exception noted above. If readers can simply meld the descriptions as also being characteristic of a Six Sigma organization, and discard the mischaracterizations of Six Sigma as written, they are in for a very positive learning experience.

Michael Kennedy has created a most entertaining and informative book which explores an, heretofore, unexplored aspect of why Toyota, and companies like Toyota, excel at bringing new products to market with 4 times the efficiency of their North American competitors. The book is written in a fictionalized style, ala "The Goal", and conveys the philosophies and paradigms that Toyota embraces which set them apart, in time-to-market and profits, even in this post-bubble economy. Kennedy draws from his life experiences, both as an organizational developer of concurrent engineering processes at a Fortune 100 company, and from his involvement with a National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS) collaboration which studied and documented this subject. His volume chronicles how IRT Industries, struggles with their product development processes, their discovery of how Toyota uses knowledge-based paradigms, and how IRT grudgingly realizes that major paradigms shifts, not process changes nor process compliance is required to be a world class product development company. And, maybe best of all, he provides a detailed plan and methodology by which enlightened companies can implement what they learn from this volume.

For anyone interested in the next stage of Product Development -- this is a must read. The Toyota system encorporates what I felt has been missing in the product development process for so long. It takes into account the chaos that exists during development and actually encourages it instead of covering it up.

I've beginning to incorporate these concepts into our process and am excited about the results I'm seeing.

This book would sell a million copies if it had a different title. The one it has makes you think what it contains is limited strictly to how to make product development more efficient. The truth is, the book outlines a revolutionary way to manage any group of information workers to make them more productive than they would ever be using traditional management techniques. The title might also make you think this new method is an extension of the Toyota Production System, the basis of lean production. It's true the system comes from Toyota. But the only thing the production and product development systems have in common is the core concept, which is to eliminate any activity or expense that doesn't add value from a customer's perspective. Most people in industry know about the Toyota Production System. The company's Product Development System eliminates wasted motion, too, but it does so in a way many western development engineers probably have not thought about and never will unless they spend time "thinking outside the box." Rather than tackle one job at a time in a linear process as is done in the traditional set up, Toyota's goal is to generate a constant flow of new vehicles. So rather than assign a team to focus on developing a specific model, work is concentrated at the subsystem level. The idea is to develop innovative subsystems that can be mixed and matched to create a plethora of new cars and trucks. This is a different way of approaching things and based on the result, it is considerably more efficient. The same idea can be used in a host of disciplines beyond the development of new cars or other widgets. It can work in marketing communications, architecture, software development, you name it. Let's face it. You can't make knowledge workers productive by directing them. The way you make them more productive is by creating an environment in which their innate creativity can thrive.

I like this book. The "story-like" format of this book is entertaining but it gets a little old for a hard core techy like me. I definitly gained some interesting insights into the Toyota development system but would have liked more focus on the facts and the theories than on the story that was used to convey the message. The ideas are very enlightening, surely valuable, and worth the read. I can over look the style to get to the ideas. It was an easy read and the "story" moved along nicely. I recommend this book but would like to find one without the fluff of the "story" vehicle.

The title of the book is somewhat misleading. The book not only presents lean product development but also how to transform a traditional product development process into a lean development process. The book is written as a novel. We get to understand the pillars of lean product development (set-based engineering, strong leadership, work force engagement, re-use) as the story unfolds. Each chapter ends with recap of the important concepts that have been presented in the novel. The first chapters are about the differences between traditional product development with its linear process and loop-backs when required, and lean development based on set-based engineering. The latter chapters are about introducing lean development in an organization. I found the presentation to strike an unfortunate middle ground: the novel part is not gripping and the end-of-chapter explanations are too shallow. The author would have been better inspired to write a real novel or a textbook. The shift of focus between lean development and its deployment is also a problem: it would have been preferable to deal with only one topic but more in-depth.

Some reviewers have favorably compared this book to The Goal. I beg to differ. The Goal is about the implementation of the theory of constraints at a troubled plant. A series of events happen: bottlenecks are discovered, eliminated, batch sizes are reduced, etc. This is gripping and educating. This book is about the writing of a proposal for change. We follow the protagonists to their meetings. This does not put you on the edge of your seat. And, more importantly, there are no real world issues. The implied message is: implement the new paradigm and everything will be fine. This is not realistic. I want to understand what may go wrong, see the nitty-gritty details. The Goal discusses these issues but this book does no.

Overall, this is not a bad book, but the lack of focus and the lack of detailed information will make you search elsewhere for a better presentation.