It's easier said than done, but manufacturers need to launch new products that bring value to customers and deliver new revenue streams.
As businesses in every sector claw their way out of a recession, launching new products that deliver value to customers and new revenue streams is a critical but difficult task. The ability to launch products quickly and cost effectively has never been more important but also never more challenging.
In recent years there has been a shift in the engineering process to meet the demand of bringing new products to market. Companies across all industries typically develop one concept of a product and see it through many iterations to completion. This causes engineers to focus on firefighting rather than innovation— some companies can invest heavily in research and development for products that are delayed or never reach the market thereby reducing their return on investment.
The Simpler Design System (SDS) from Simpler Consulting assists organizations with the product development process. SDS provides a suite of management techniques that ensures the pace of knowledge capture and decision making supports the creative process of product development. This enables better decisions to be made throughout the product development process—leading to reduced cost and lead time to develop a new product while improving quality.
Cast Study: SDS Helps Elekta Focus on Innovation
Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Elekta is a leading supplier of radiation oncology solutions and a pioneer in developing innovative clinical solutions for treating cancer. Over the last 30 years, Elekta’s oncology unit has been responsible for introducing many of the critical technological advances in radiation oncology.
The market is highly competitive, with several medical device giants in the space including Varian Medical and Siemens Healthcare. Elekta found itself in a “features war” with these large device-makers. To stay competitive, Elekta recognized it needed to focus on developing new products and bringing them to market faster.
In July 2008, Elekta and Simpler Consulting, a global management consulting firm that helps companies improve processes to stimulate business-impacting results, began applying SDS to one of its most challenging projects, the development of a high performing multileaf collimator.
The Problem: Winning a Features War
A leader in Image Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT), Elekta found itself in a race with competitors to develop new products with advanced features.In a features race, company executives often turn to engineers to drive innovation and expedite new product development to gain competitive advantage.
Elekta was developing a new, multileaf collimator, which works with image guided radiation therapy (IGRT) to shape radiation beams and deliver optimized dose distribution for fast and focused treatment. With the goal of expediting development of the new technology, a year into the design process Elekta went to Simpler Consulting for help.
When Simpler first joined the project, they found Elekta was using traditional project management tools, such as Gantt charts, to manage the innovation and R&D process. However, they were struggling with the amount of trial and error that is inherent in innovation.
“The lead engineer spent most of his time creating Gantt charts assigning tasks to engineers,” said Rob Westrick, vice president of business transformation at Elekta. “However, charts are not an effective way to motivate staff and do not reflect real-time changes that unfold during the R&D process.”
Innovation occurs through trial and error. However, Elekta was guilty of making assumptions and rushing towards a prototype, only to find that some assumptions were incorrect and the prototype would inevitably fail. Elekta needed a solution that would accelerate the design process and ensure the final product would work.
The Solution: Re-Engaging Team Members
Adding customer value to design: Simpler Consulting worked with the engineers at Elekta to set targets and measurable values against both customer needs and functional features. Through this process, the team discovered fundamental elements of the design were not clearly understood in the prototype.
For example, the proposed design utilized an optical positioning system. Instead of hoping it could be easily incorporated into the design, Simpler worked with Elekta to test this function at an early stage of the design process. This enabled engineers to trial and take into consideration solutions before getting too much further into the design process.
SDS was used to identify all known requirements, missing design knowledge and design choices that were yet to be made. These were then used to identify a “Decision Flow,” which identifies the sequence of decisions to minimize wasted design effort. For each decision, the knowledge required to make a good decision is identified. This is important, as it prevents a decision merely being made by whoever is the most authoritative voice in the room (which is often how decisions are made amongst a team) vs. finding the facts to discover the right choice that needs to be made.
Improving flow to focus on decisions: New discoveries inevitably change the tasks required to complete a project. For this reason, the Simpler Design System encourages companies to only plan tasks in detail to an eight week horizon. This process, known as “Vertical Value Stream Mapping,” outlines the tasks that need to be done to make decisions. In this process, the decisions that need to be made form the “backbone” and guide the project, while tasks and timing on the project constantly change.
At Elekta, before applying the SDS, the Lead Engineer complained that his project plan was continuously out of date because as new information and problems were encountered, the tasks changed. The engineer found applying Decision Flow helped tremendously to work toward progress instead of setbacks.
Re-engaging team members: Simpler Consulting helped Elekta replace the laborious Gantt charts and develop a new plan of action. Simpler created a task-based plan for eight weeks of activity. The plan was displayed in a highly visible location – the wall of the team’s room. Post-Its were written by the person doing a task; no longer were assignments put in a computer by the lead engineer and delegated to a team member. By creating the task list as a team, everyone had a role in the ownership of the project.
Additionally, a “Team Board” was created and the team met every morning for a maximum of 20 minutes creating an efficient way for the lead engineer to gain updates on the team’s activities.
“By working with Simpler Consulting to develop team-based project planning, after only two months I had time to concentrate on the engineering aspect of the project and solving technical problems,” said the lead engineer.
Simpler Consulting finds that by simply engaging employees to work as a team in this way, companies can experience 20-30 percent efficiency gains.The Results: A Big Reveal
By implementing SDS to create a “team-centric” approach and reduce risk at an early stage of the project, Elekta was able to minimize manufacturing, assembly, servicing, cost and performance issues, and unveil the multileaf collimator at the largest industry meeting of the year—the 51st Annual Meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO).
On the heels of this success, SDS is now being rolled out and implemented across Elekta’s global oncology division. In fact, more than 30 percent of its projects are now applying SDS to the design process with the goal of applying it to all new projects.
In the medical device industry, the ability to get a product to market quicker, and ahead of the competition is critical. However, the many fundamentals of innovation and design are often overlooked as product engineering has become progressively more dependent on technology and paperwork.
As a result, companies are investing a large amount in research and development to bring new products to market but do not get the desired return on investment. SDS helps companies to reduce waste and improve efficiency in their product development.
Brian Wiggins has been with Simpler since 2008. As Product Leader SDS, Brian is responsible for delivering and developing the SDS product. He provides coaching for internal development of Simpler Sensei’s and the tools to be used for Engineering Improvement Programs. For more information visit www.simpler.com.
