How is it applied to our industry?
We hear so much about “lean” these days: Lean Manufacturing, which most companies have embraced and are working towards, then there’s’ Lean Accounting, Lean Purchasing, and Lean New Product Development. Some people think Lean New Product Development is simply a derivation of Lean Manufacturing where you employ the same waste reduction methodologies and you will achieve results. While incremental improvements may result, Lean New Product Development is really a total paradigm shift.
Vernay
also serves very competitive markets, providing elastomeric
check valves
such as
Duckbill Check Valves
or
Umbrella Check Valves
to the following markets:
Automotive
,
Medical
,
Small Appliances
and
Small Engine
. We must continue to strive for improvement in all areas of our business. In 2007, initial research was done to investigate and learn more about Lean Product Development. In addition to reading the books, Vernay contracted the services of NCMS (National Center for Manufacturing Sciences) for help. Their executive Director, Michael Gnam, came to Yellow Springs in December of 2007 and presented to the corporate management an executive overview on the subject. It helped tie together the learning’s and left us with the age old question: How do we apply it in our industry?
Basically the concepts are not complex. In our traditional New Product development cycle (labeled Point Based in the books); we generate various concepts, select one and start the prototype development. This is generally an iterative cycle that stops when we run out of time. We then move to production development, many times with a sub-optimized design, material or process, launch it and work the problems out in manufacturing. Obviously this approach is not ideal and very costly as resource demand can grow exponentially during this cycle.
Employing Lean Product Development Methodology (Set Based), we generate the various concepts (some are gathered from prior development programs as it is a knowledge based system), and evaluate many solution sets during the prototyping cycle. From this, we learn which set of solutions performed the best for the application at hand and it is selected at the end. However, the learning’s form this activity are to be captured using Knowledge Briefs (or as Toyota terms them, A3 reports) that capture and retain the significant learning’s in a database for use in future development projects. This approach is also designed to incorporate learning’s from suppliers and sub suppliers as it is recognized as essential to include the entire supply chain.
When we have new development projects, we first try to understand fully the application it will be used in. This includes many factors involving form, fit and function as well as information regarding assembly.
The development team then uses a Set Based approached when possible. We may evaluate multiple compounds and evaluate how well the function at the customer as well as how well they process internally. We may evaluate multiple design geometries and even multiple processes in some cases. There is more up- front cost but it can significantly reduce the cost later on (when cost are the highest).
We have to yet make the complete paradigm shift as we are still assessing our current MIS system and needs that will be required to incorporate the Knowledge Briefs that are essential to the success. Plans are to conduct a more in depth evaluation in 2009 to determine these needs.
The end result once we achieve it will be higher quality elastomer products and assemblies, developed in much less time with fewer resources.