Visible Knowledge For Flawless Design

Visible knowledge is a tool nearly lost in the West, but it has been used to great effect by Toyota in its 50-year march from noncompetitiveness to its current status as the second largest automobile company in the world. It is key for the 50% growth in market share Toyota plans for this decade despite worldwide overcapacity in the auto business. This book presents the reader with a systematic approach to create, capture, and display knowledge in a way that allows development teams to optimize the design of their products and production processes. Visible knowledge not only applies to knowledge management, but provides a means of collaboration to facilitate better decision-making in the development process. This book has evolved out of a manuscript that Allen Ward, the foremost U.S. expert on lean product development, was writing at the time of his untimely death. It is not intended to be a treatise of Lean product development methods. Quite the opposite—it is focused on one small piece, "visible knowledge." It is, however, one technique that Dantar Oosterwal and Durward Sobek have found to be very effective at Harley-Davidson and other places, and a tool that can make a difference whether used by itself or as a starting point for a larger journey into Lean product development. In completing this work, Oosterwal and Sobek kept the aim true to Allen’s original intent. The preface and first three chapters are essentially Allen’s original intellectual contribution. They have made editorial changes to improve readability and clarity of explanation. Throughout, they have attempted to preserve Allen’s voice in the writing, even keeping the narrative in first person as it was originally written. They have also added a fourth chapter that highlights some practical ways to apply the ideas presented in earlier chapters, illustrated with case examples from their experience.

This book offers new insights into the complex set of activities and decisions of product innovation management. It provides concepts, methods, and tools that can help accelerate the introduction of successful products to the market in an increasingly competitive and changing business landscape. It also offers examples and case studies, and it is the result of more than 20 years of study, research, and consulting carried out by the two authors in the field of innovation management. The book discusses the demanding challenges of product innovation and offers practitioners guidance on how to respond to these challenges. It presents a three-level framework (the “innovation pyramid”), which reflects the core components of a firm’s innovation capability: first, intelligence - absorbing information and knowledge from the outside world by looking beyond the familiar territories of the current market, technology, and customers; second, discovery - exploring opportunities for innovation through creative ideation and technology experimentation; and third, development - transforming opportunities into profitable new products and services.

A Life and Death Experience: Getting Deep in the Book of Romans

"Success is Assured" was born from a pair using those design practices over a century ago: The Wright Brothers. They set about methodically learning the causal relationships between the different design decisions they needed to make and the performance of the airplane. The Wright Brothers fundamentally transformed the front end of development into a sharply focused learning and decision-making process, and thereby eliminated the late - process rework in which their competition was stuck. Similarly, Toyota built an amazing manual product development system that consistently created a cadence of high quality products that customers want. Myriads of Lean principles, jargon, and tools have been introduced and applied with minimal impact on design loopbacks, engineering productivity, and knowledge reuse within small to midsize engineering companies – and almost no penetration within highly complex engineering companies. This book teaches methodologies to relentlessly expose knowledge gaps and trade-offs early and optimize results before detailed design begins, thereby avoiding the expensive firefighting and engineering rework that consume most of our engineering capacity today. This book teaches new thinking and methodologies to convert the chaotic front end of product development into a convergent process of set-based learning and continuous innovation – a game changer for companies that depend upon a steady flow of innovative products. Watch this video and understand how to consistently satisfy your customers on-time and on-budget! Visit www.SuccessIsAssured.com

From near-extinction in the early eighties, Harley-Davidson rose to worldwide recognition and is still today one of the great, iconic American motorcycle brands. In this insider guide, former Harley-Davidson executive Dantar Oosterwal offers an exclusive look at how Harley-Davidson was able to adapt in an ever-changing world to stay on top and stay in existence. In The Lean Machine, readers learn about Harley-Davidson’s secret weapon and go-to formula for outstanding success: Knowledge-Based Product Development. Rooted in Japanese productivity improvement techniques, this method helped Harley realize an unprecedented fourfold increase in throughput in half the time--powering annual growth of more than ten percent. Winner of the 2017 Shingo Prize for Literature, The Lean Machine--which is part business journal, part analysis, and part step-by-step toolkit--takes readers through the day-to-day transformation at Harley and identifies universal change and improvement issues so that companies in any industry can incorporate this game-changing system--with predictably excellent results.

Why has the durable paper shopping bag been largely replaced by its flimsy plastic counterpart? What circuitous chain of improvements led to such innovations as the automobile cup holder and the swiveling vegetable peeler? With the same relentless curiosity and lucid, witty prose he brought to his earlier books, Henry Petroski looks at some of our most familiar objects and reveals that they are, in fact, works in progress. For there can never be an end to the quest for the perfect design. To illustrate his thesis, Petroski tells the story of the paper drinking cup, which owes its popularity to the discovery that water glasses could carry germs. He pays tribute to the little plastic tripod that keeps pizza from sticking to the box and analyzes the numerical layouts of telephones and handheld calculators. Small Things Considered is Petroski at his most trenchant and provocative, casting his eye not only on everyday artifacts but on their users as well.