The Challenges of Implementing TCTs: Understanding Their Contributions and Limitations

What keeps R&D managers awake at night? That depends on what the current trends are in our globally integrated world. In the eighties we worried about quality. It was the big issue revolutionizing all of manufacturing, driven primarily by the Japanese but increasingly adopted by leading-edge U.S. companies like Motorola and Hewlett-Packard. In the nineties we focused on accelerated product development methodologies and agile manufacturing (JIT, mass customization, etc.). Now, at the beginning of a new decade, there are three major nightmares:

• Strategic planning and portfolio management.
• New product development (NPD) "pipeline" management.
  
• Outsourcing and supply-chain management. Time-compression technologies (TCTs) address two of these three problems.
  

What to Do: Strategic Planning and Your Product Portfolio

The first big challenge facing manufacturing companies is knowing precisely what business you're in and deciding what new products or services to develop. You need to manage your product development portfolio to achieve a three-way balance: maximum economic value, best strategic alignment and good portfolio balance (across markets, product lines, development resources, technologies, etc.). Management needs to understand, articulate and communicate the company's strategy (three- or five-year horizon). And this strategy needs to be translated into a long-range product plan.

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is not knowing when to say "no." The result: too many projects, too few resources, lack of focus and poor prioritization. If you don't know the economic value of the proposed products and if you don't know the value of time, you can't make intelligent tradeoffs. You over-commit to features, schedules and/or cost. You spend too much time on derivatives and customer specials and not enough time on new "platform" products.

TCTs have almost no impact on strategic planning and portfolio management. This critical activity takes dedication and commitment by the senior management team. Without proper product planning, all of the new design and development technologies will be useless or even counterproductive - no more than techno-toys. As General Dwight Eisenhower said, "Plans are useless; planning is essential."

How to Do It: Managing the NPD Pipeline

A second nightmare for R&D managers is figuring out how to get projects through the development life cycle quickly and efficiently. There is always pressure to do more-faster-better with the same limited resources. Time-to-market is the most common "number one" priority.

The NPD process is typically depicted as a series of phases or stages with "gates" or review meetings to control the orderly progression of projects through them (Go/Hold/Kill). The number of phases and their names will vary, but the staged-development concept is quite universal. It can be modeled as a pipeline, with valves to control the flow as seen in Figure 1.

The pipeline is a funnel - not a tunnel! Not all projects that are initiated should be completed. A good rule of thumb is to start three to 10 times the number of projects that you expect to complete - culling out the weaker ones at the early gates.

Many companies fall into the trap of thinking that if you want more products coming out, shove more projects into the front end of the pipeline. In fact, by doing this time-to-market suffers and a host of adverse behaviors ensue. It is not unusual to find companies with a list of "active" projects that is four to 10 times bigger than they can realistically work on. Most of the extra projects are sitting idle on a back burner. But they still consume emotional bandwidth, unnecessarily tax management oversight and confuse priorities. Development resources are routinely "loaded" to greater than 200 percent of capacity. You should never run your factory this way.

Companies need to balance the demand for new products/projects with the available capacity (development resources) that can address that demand. Failure to do so will choke the NPD pipeline.

Assistance From Technology

Most of the problems in the NPD pipeline occur during the early stages - the "fuzzy front end." This is where a small investment of time and new tools can have huge payback later on during validation and launch. Take the time to do it right (up front), rather than having to do it over and over again.

TCTs can have a very large impact on the investigation phases. CAD models, virtual reality labs and rapid prototypes for feasibility modeling can slash the time it takes to move from the initial problem statement through various concepts to the selected implementation. Fully rendered or physical models help customers, suppliers, marketing, manufacturing, tooling and all members of the extended cross-functional team understand the design proposals far better. Even the design engineers can better communicate design concepts among themselves in 3-D.

The contribution of TCTs during later development stages has been very well documented, particularly in the pages of this journal. They lower costs, increase quality and slash time. These new technologies help in design, analysis, product documentation, simulation, testing, prototyping, tooling, training, assembly documentation, fixturing and short-run manufacturing. And TCTs are facilitating and speeding up more tasks every day.

How Much Should You Do? Partnering And Supply-Chain Management

A third source of sleepless nights is deciding how much of your development needs to happen in-house. This of course will vary greatly among organizations, given their capabilities and strategy. But it is safe to say that the trend is toward more outsourcing and strategic partnering in a concurrent engineering environment. The reasons are simple:

• You can distribute the risk (but must also share some of the reward);
• You can leverage the expertise of specialists without having to own or maintain those resources; and
• You can often achieve better, cheaper, and faster solutions with the help of capable suppliers or partners.

To build "virtual corporations" you need state of the art communication capabilities. Ideally, teams are co-located. This is often impossible or impractical, so various collaboration and time-compression technologies come to the rescue. Interestingly, the original time compression tool - the telephone - still plays a major role. Yet, this century-old technology must be augmented with much more advanced forms of telephony, e-mail, multimedia conferencing, master-model techniques, rapid prototyping and tooling, simulation, analysis, data-management solutions, collaboration tools (typically net-based, e.g., CoCreate's OneSpace), and rapid deployment of design and manufacturing data across the globe.

Time-Compression Technologies magazine regularly brings you case studies highlighting current best practices in these collaborative technologies. The use of "3-D printing" to aid the customer (and the designer!) in concept selection; or rapid prototypes to help the toolmaker design the mold; or CAD animations to determine factory layout or assembly sequence - the list is growing endlessly.

More Than Technology: Process

Despite dramatic advancements in communication and collaboration tools, teams still struggle with effectively implementing concurrent engineering (a.k.a. integrated product development). The problem gets worse when you grow from integrating across your own organization to integrating across the entire supply chain or across multiple partner-organizations (termed "3-D concurrent engineering"). That's because the challenge is 10 percent technology, 90 percent psychology. The processes and even the culture of the organization(s) need to be changed in order to embrace the distributed-development model. Openness and trust are the hallmarks of such an environment.

The single most powerful key to achieving concurrent engineering is having a robust process. The NPD process must be documented, repeatable, clear, simple and accessible. Make it scaleable and flexible, so it will handle different sizes and complexities of projects. Front load the gates: spend 30 to 40 percent of the total effort on the proposal, definition (specification) and investigation stages - versus 10 to 15 percent in the more typical serial-engineering model. This heavy up-front investment can avoid costly downstream rework. Get suppliers involved early and often. The process should make it clear what needs to be done by whom and when. Then hold everyone accountable. Use checkpoint meetings to manage resources and risk, not to micromanage the project details or the development team's decisions. Make gates "permeable" and always, always focus on speed. It's not the big who eat the small; it's the fast who eat the slow.

Technology: What It Can and Can't Do

Those involved with the exciting, expanding role of TCTs in new product development need to recognize what these tools can contribute and also what their limitations are. There is a temptation for technologists to become enamored with the "gee-whiz." In general, tools are enablers, rarely the solution. The age-old adage still applies: breakthrough results derive from equal parts technology, process and people. Ignore the latter two at your peril.

It is possible to promote TCTs for their "Star Wars" capabilities and magical techno-wizardry - they're really great stuff. They do help with the insomnia. But always keep in mind the greater context in which they are applied. Most R&D managers lie awake at night worrying about some variant of the three challenges discussed here, or spend inordinate amounts of their management bandwidth at work dealing with them. You will be more successful if you understand the fuzzy, big-picture, non-technical issues that confront today's world-class new product developers.

For more information contact Bob Neel, principal of Product Development Process Consulting (Seattle, WA) at (206) 932-6543.