Lean Product and Process Development

"The real differential between Toyota and other vehicle manufacturers is not the Toyota Production System. It's the Toyota Product Development System."

- Kosaku Yamada, chief engineer of the Lexus ES 300.

Strangely enough Toyota is severely underestimated when it comes to product development and innovation - few people notice how bizarrely good Toyota is. While in production the differences are less big than they used to be (in the car industry everyone has embraced some form of Lean Manufacturing by now), the differences in product development between Toyota and the competition are staggering.

Lean Product and Process Development was written by the late Allen Ward, and revised by his former PhD student Durward K. Sobek II. As an artificial intelligence researcher, Ward developed a theory on how learning could be much more effective. He was advised to take a look at Toyota. He was stunned to see that Toyota was already practicing that way - and doing many other innovative things! Subsequently, Ward has been one of the people who studied Toyota early on and for a very long time, with a focus on product development.

If Lean manufacturing is already fundamentally different from all of our intuitions, Lean development is even more so - those who are very experienced in Lean manufacturing actually know hardly anything about Lean product development. There is an incredible amount to learn on this topic, and Al Ward provides one deep insight after another. Among the topics covered are:

• What is 'customer value' in product development, and what is waste in product development - the so-called knowledge wastes.
• the role of the chief engineer
• cadence, flow and pull in product development
• How set-based concurrent engineering (not to be confused with 'normal' concurrent engineering!) makes failure impossible, and how you can use trade-off sheets to do so.
• What teamwork and development looks like in Lean Product Development

This is perhaps the most difficult book in the Lean canon. Fortunately, the book is full of practical recommendations for getting started and then finding your own way.

In this second, revised edition, Durward Sobek, professor of mechanical engineering at Montana State University - and one of Ward's first students - has edited and reorganized the original text to make it more accessible and applicable.

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