Lean Design - Excerpt from book by Ron Mascitelli (6)

Introduction - About this Guidebook

        There’s waste in your product designs, and it’s costing you a fortune. Oh, it may not look like waste to you…at least not yet. But soon you will begin to see the profits that are being squandered and the opportunities being missed. More important, you will learn how to solve cost problems at every stage of product development. You are about to begin a guided tour of product cost-reduction methods, beginning at the earliest stages of project selection, and ending with the launch of a successful and highly profitable new product. Along the way, I will introduce you to eighteen lean design tools that are practical, efficient, and immediately deployable. Each tool addresses a different opportunity for cost reduction during product design; as a group they represent an integrated approach to achieving the highest possible product value at the lowest achievable manufacturing cost.
Before we go further, let’s establish the intended audience for this book. This is a guidebook for practitioners, by a practitioner. All of the methods you will learn can be implemented at the level of an individual designer, a product development team, or even throughout an entire organization. In other words, these are tools that are meant to be used. If you are a member or leader of a product design team, welcome to the tour. If you lead an engineering, marketing, or manufacturing organization, please join the group. Improvement champions, manufacturing engineers, Six-Sigma blackbelts, quality specialists, procurement folks; you’re definitely in the right place. If your firm is committed to lean manufacturing and looking to expand their vision, you deserve a front row seat; the tools in this guidebook are specifically designed to dramatically enhance your efforts toward a lean enterprise. Other interested readers are welcome as well…provided that you are comfortable with the pragmatic (and decidedly informal) tone of this material.
        Just a few administrative details and we’ll be on our way to our first stop on the journey. I’ve described this work as a guidebook, and that is the analogy you should keep in your mind as you proceed. My intention is that this book become dog-eared and worn with constant use. Visual communication is used extensively to help illustrate key concepts. Templates, forms, and worksheets are provided whenever possible to let you hit the ground running with your new knowledge. To assist you in expanding your knowledge, I’ve even taken the liberty of providing lists of references (along with my personal ratings) at the end of each major section of the book. Even the chronological order of presentation is intended to convey the sense of a journey; from the soft and fuzzy world of conceptual design to that final traumatic birthing process that characterizes the transition of new products into production.
        Well, the tour is about to leave the station (or terminal, or dock…choose whatever fantasy you wish). As you board, take a quick look at the summary of lean design tools provided in the two figures that accompany this introduction. The first figure lists all eighteen tools, with a brief synopsis of each tool’s applicability and the section within this guidebook in which that tool is described. The second figure suggests the timeframes within a typical product development process during which each tool would be most beneficial. Naturally, your situation may be different from the “typical.” These tools are intended to be flexible, scalable, and easily adaptable; I’ll be providing hints on how to tailor them to your specific needs at every stop along the way.
        Welcome to the world of lean design. I hope you enjoy your intellectual journey, but make no mistake. Your travels will be wasted if you don’t commit yourself to putting the tools you’ve learned to work!