NC State of Business

If you’ve been involved in lean implementation efforts in your manufacturing plant, healthcare facility, or office, then chances are good that you have used a technique called Value Stream Mapping (VSM). When you map your value stream, you go to where the process is occurring and identify both value-added and non-value-added activities taking place in the product flow or business process flow. The goal is to identify and eliminate waste in your process. But have you ever thought about how your product development cycle also has waste and non-value-added steps? Applying lean principles to product can development can enable you to reduce the cost and/or time to market for your new products, while increasing the effectiveness of your technical resources. Many of the tools used in lean manufacturing (such as VSM, “going to gemba”, visual controls, and dashboards) also work well in the development world.

If you would like to learn more about applying Lean concepts to product development, consider attending the Quick-Start Lean Product Development workshop in Concord on Friday, October 23. The course instructor, Ron Mascitelli, president of Technology Perspectives, is a recognized leader in the development of advanced product development methods.