Never again!
Having lived through what was widely acknowledged to be one of the most challenging product launches for many years, I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone. The stress, the sleepless nights, the angry phone calls and, above it all, the sense of hopelessness that I wasn’t able to do anything to make it better – they had taken me to near breaking point.
I had taken up my new role only a few weeks before the launch and everyone gave the impression that things were in place. However, as soon as production started, cracks began to show and we were struggling to have all the parts ready to ship to the customer on time, not to mention the quality issues that had not been fully resolved during development.
Nine months later, we had turned it round, and I was determined to make sure that future launches would be much, much better planned and no–one would have to suffer like I did. What’s more, we had time to do it. With the fixes that my mentor, Ron, had supported my team to put in place, keeping on top of daily progress took no more than a couple of hours each day, and we had time to work on improvements. But where to start?
Looking back, we acknowledged that the concept of what we had been asked to do was sound. It was based on the same idea used by our best customer, Honda, where it worked really smoothly. However, it became clear that the work required to translate that idea into a robust, workable process just hadn’t been done. Yet we knew that, in amongst all that mess, were the clues we needed to get it right next time, if only we acted on them in a disciplined way.
We already had good examples of better process applied to the development of the product and related tooling, and realised no–one had up until now applied the same discipline to developing the production management processes. So that’s what we set out to do.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
GEORGE SANTAYANA, SPANISH-AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER
Building a better way
Starting with all of the elements we knew hadn’t worked well on this project, we started to ask ourselves what would be needed to put things right, initially just dumping them onto a long list (these days I’d do this on sticky notes for ease of later sorting). Then we started interviewing key players in our own business and the customer’s to test our understanding, see what we’d missed and, crucially, asking when in the product development process that aspect would be best addressed.
Next we got to work assigning all of the key actions to the established project phases from concept design, through development and pre–production to the start of volume production. We considered which activity provided input to a later step and so on. Over time, by taking a proactive rather than reactive approach, we built a comprehensive map of all of the activities required to enable a successful production launch and how they fitted together. This proved a key contribution to enabling the next new programme for that customer being one of the smoothest launches ever – quite a transformation.
While common automotive industry practice today is recognisably a refined version of what we started over 30 years ago, it’s not always plain sailing. New product launches are always tough, and unexpected challenges still come up. However, the issues are generally smaller scale stuff and they’re picked up earlier. More importantly, there is a clear process to manage them rather than the manic firefighting the my team and I experienced. Better to do the hard work earlier and respond in a simpler, predictable manner.
Equally, I’m pleased to say that this approach, in an evolved form, has helped many of my clients in a diverse range of businesses and disciplines, to refine their processes for bringing new products to market with great effect so that they can deliver “high performance with ease”.
Can I help you?
If this looks useful, I’ve created a more detailed worksheet to guide you through the process that you can download here
Equally, if you’d like to talk through your specific situation, I’d love to have a chat. You can book a free, no obligation call using the button below. No pressure, no sales pitch, just an open conversation and, hopefully, some helpful input. Alternatively, drop me an email or message me on LinkedIn.