Durward K. Sobek

Reducing waste and errors: piloting lean principles at Intermountain Healthcare.

BACKGROUND The Toyota Production System (TPS), based on industrial engineering principles and operational innovations, is used to achieve waste reduction and efficiency while increasing product quality. Several key tools and principles, adapted to health care, have proved effective in improving hospital operations. TOOLS Value Stream Maps (VSMs), which represent the key people, material, and information flows required to deliver a product or service, distinguish between value-adding and non-value-adding steps. The one-page Problem-Solving A3 Report guides staff through a rigorous and systematic problem-solving process. PILOT PROJECT at INTERMOUNTAIN HEALTHCARE: In a pilot project, participants made many improvements, ranging from simple changes implemented immediately (for example, heart monitor paper not available when a patient presented with a dysrythmia) to larger projects involving patient or information flow issues across multiple departments. Most of the improvements required little or no investment and reduced significant amounts of wasted time for front-line workers. In one unit, turnaround time for pathologist reports from an anatomical pathology lab was reduced from five to two days. CONCLUSIONS TPS principles and tools are applicable to an endless variety of processes and work settings in health care and can be used to address critical challenges such as medical errors, escalating costs, and staffing shortages.

Adapting real options to new product development by modeling the second Toyota paradox

Uncertainty in product development projects creates significant challenges for managers who are under intense competitive pressures to increase product quality, while reducing development time and costs. Traditional wisdom dictates the early selection of a single design in order to freeze interfaces between product subsystems so that team members can work effectively in parallel, resulting in more productive product development efforts. Prior research, however, uncovered a paradoxical case. Toyota Motor Corporation achieves the fastest development times in its industry by intentionally delaying alternative selection, a strategy termed set-based development. The current work adapts real options concepts to product development management to partially explain this paradox. A formal simulation model is used to show that converging too quickly or too slowly degrades project value. Furthermore, the model demonstrates that the wisdom of set-based strategies can be explained by the application of a real options approach to product development management. Implications for managers and directions for future work are discussed.

Iteration in Engineering Design: Inherent and Unavoidable or Product of Choices Made?

Iteration in design has different meanings, ranging from simple task repetition to heuristic reasoning processes. Determining the need to iterate is important to improve the design process on cost, time, and quality, but currently there is no categorization of iterations conducive to this goal. After exploring the possible causes and attempts to address them, we propose to classify iterations as rework, design, or behavioral. This framework suggests that design teams should try to eliminate rework iterations, perform design iterations without skipping abstraction levels, and do behavioral iterations in parallel.© 2003 ASME

How Process Affects Performance: An Analysis of Student Design Productivity

In this paper, we analyze journal data from twelve student projects to help identify design processes that achieve higher quality in less time. Journal data are coded for the number of engineering hours spent on different design activities at three design levels. Each project’s outcome is independently assessed for client satisfaction and design quality. We use factor analysis to group common variability into factors. A multivariate linear regression model of three factors explains 91% of productivity variance within the study sample. The factor scoring coefficients are then used to translate the regression model coefficients back to activities and design levels. Results indicate that generating ideas and defining the problem at a system level are the key discriminating variables between more or less productive design teams in our sample, while conceptual design at the front end and detail-level work at the back end are not associated with productivity.Copyright

Relating Design Process to Quality: A Virtual Design of Experiments Approach

This paper focuses on better understanding how design processes affect outcomes in mechanical engineering design. Following a general design research methodology, process data were collected from student design journals and tested for association with design quality as measured by an external evaluation using a virtual design of experiments approach. The results indicate that more time spent on system-level design (including problem generation, idea generation, and analysis activity) and on concept-level problem definition activity associate positively with design quality, while more time spent on concept-level idea generation, detailed design, and refinement associated negatively with design quality. These results imply that student designers should emphasize problem definition, information gathering, and system-level design work more so than high-level idea generation activities.

Experiment on a system-level design tool

System-level design pertains to questions of product or system architecture, configuration, and layout; and as such, provides an important bridge between conceptual engineering design work and detailed design decisions. Prior research indicates that this phase of design is important to successful outcomes of design processes, yet it is not well understood. This paper reports the development and experimental testing of a system-level design tool that aids student designers in improving design quality through enhanced understanding of system-level design issues and alternative selection. We found that use of the tool produced significant improvements in design quality among two experimental groups of mechanical engineering students. By developing and testing this tool, we hope to prove the usefulness of tools that aid engineering design at a system level, particularly in reducing heavily iterative and non-productive tasks.System-level design pertains to questions of product or system architecture, configuration, and layout; and as such, provides an important bridge between conceptual engineering design work and detailed design decisions. Prior research indicates that this phase of design is important to successful outcomes of design processes, yet it is not well understood. This paper reports the development and experimental testing of a system-level design tool that aids student designers in improving design quality through enhanced understanding of system-level design issues and alternative selection. We found that use of the tool produced significant improvements in design quality among two experimental groups of mechanical engineering students. By developing and testing this tool, we hope to prove the usefulness of tools that aid engineering design at a system level, particularly in reducing heavily iterative and non-productive tasks.

A problem-solving routine for improving hospital operations.

PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to examine empirically why a systematic problem-solving routine can play an important role in the process improvement efforts of hospitals. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH Data on 18 process improvement cases were collected through semi-structured interviews, reports and other documents, and artifacts associated with the cases. The data were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. FINDINGS Adherence to all the steps of the problem-solving routine correlated to greater degrees of improvement across the sample. Analysis resulted in two models. The first partially explains why hospital workers tended to enact short-term solutions when faced with process-related problems; and tended not seek longer-term solutions that prevent problems from recurring. The second model highlights a set of self-reinforcing behaviors that are more likely to address problem recurrence and result in sustained process improvement. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS The study was conducted in one hospital setting. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS Hospital managers can improve patient care and increase operational efficiency by adopting and diffusing problem-solving routines that embody three key characteristics. ORIGINALITY/VALUE This paper offers new insights on why caregivers adopt short-term approaches to problem solving. Three characteristics of an effective problem-solving routine in a healthcare setting are proposed.

Relating Design Activity to Quality of Outcome: A Regression Analysis of Student Projects

This study focuses on better understanding the impact of design process behavior on project outcomes, as demonstrated by mechanical engineering students at Montana State University. Using process data gathered from student design journals, and quantitative measures of project results, we examine the relationship between student designer activities and project outcomes through a multivariate linear regression analysis. Results indicate that significant differences exist between customer satisfaction, and design quality as measured by professional engineers. Further, this study finds that client satisfaction increases with time spent on problem definition activities and decreases with concept-level engineering analysis. In contrast, system-level idea generation and refinement activities are the most strongly positively associated activities for design quality, while design refinement at the concept level is a strong detractor.

Student System Level Design Activities: An Empirical Pilot Study on Improving Design Outcomes

Previous studies have indicated that system level design (SLD) has a positive association with the outcome of engineering design projects. However, the causal relationship has not been established. This pilot study will explore the feasibility of implementing a laboratory experiment on design process and attempt to demonstrate a causal relationship between SLD and design outcome quality. Using outcome data from the pilot student laboratory exercise, a comparison between design processes that used SLD activities and those that did not are made using simple statistical testing methods. The results of this comparison support previous indications that SLD has an effect on outcome quality. The difficulties of constraining students performing SLD activities gave rise to an alternative method of analyzing SLD activities and lead us to conclude that our protocol is insufficient to test design process but is suitable for testing the application of a specific tool.Copyright

Lean product and process development: a value creation paradigm that goes beyond lean manufacturing

The increased international competition in the current open global market is putting pressure on companies to improve the performance of their product development systems. To sustain and improve market share, companies must produce high-quality products in a cost-effective manner in shorter time. However, because organisational survival and long-term growth increasingly depend upon the introduction and development of new products, manufacturing companies are in need of a new model that goes beyond lean manufacturing to ensure the transformation of the enterprise to become highly competitive in todays rapid-fire and demanding marketplace. This is a response to customers and market demands of value creation, incorporating sustainability and customisation. The editors of this special issue believe that significant improvement in enterprise performance can result from the adoption of lean thinking throughout the entire product life cycle. Lean Product Development (LeanPD) concerns the application of lean thinking to the early stages of the product life cycle, from initial concept through start of full production or delivery to the client. Lean concepts were derived initially from studies of the Japanese automotive industry in the late 1980s. The practices observed in Japanese automakers were largely inspired by those at Toyota Motor Corporation, who has become the moniker for all things lean. The practices documented in this study spanned from product development systems to manufacturing systems inside the factory to supply chain management. However, to date, the practices associated with manufacturing have received the greatest attention. Lean manufacturing can be defined in simple terms as producing exactly what is needed, when it is needed, with the minimum amount of resource and space. The primary objective of lean manufacturing is often seen as the elimination of waste. While waste eliminate and fast production lead times are good (some may even say necessary) to achieve, isolated success within a manufacturing company is not sufficient to ensure long-term survival in today’s turbulent economy. What is needed is a new paradigm that will take lean thinking concepts from waste elimination into value creation. In order to make a significant change in enterprise performance and saving ultimate system costs, there is a need for the entire enterprise to undergo a lean transformation. LeanPD research focuses on value creation, provision of knowledge environment, continuous improvement and processes that encourage innovation and collaboration based on Set-Based Concurrent Engineering. This special issue presents several interesting research papers that contribute to our evolving understanding of LeanPD. Fittingly, the first paper (Khan et al.) offers a history of LeanPD as an area of study and presents a coherent LeanPD model that combines lessons from the Toyota product development system with other best practices. The paper provides an overview of the LeanPD research area and a reference framework for the LeanPD enablers that Toyota has employed, including techniques for each enabler and existing tools. Results from empirical work at five companies are also presented which show that while lean enablers have a presence in industry, relatively few have been formally adopted. The second paper (Ringen and Holtskog) discusses how intrinsic motivation is affected by lean enablers such as clear project objectives, customer requirements, continuous improvement and cross-functional teams. Through their study of Norwegian automotive suppliers, these authors remind us that the voice of customer is central to any LeanPD system, and add to that understanding the motivating effects of a clear and common understanding of customer needs across the development team. Ringen and Holtskog further provide an engaging discussion of continuous improvement methodologies within product development organisations and their confounding effects when applied to knowledge work. Moving from motivation to knowledge creation, the third paper (Lindl f, Soderberg and Persson) links LeanPD to the field of knowledge management. Using the well-known socialization, externalization, combination, internalization (SECI) model of knowledge transfer as a framework, the paper suggests that LeanPD principles and methods form a methodical foundation that promotes knowledge transfer in product development. In particular, the study underscores the importance of knowledge transfer in achieving the aims of better, faster and cheaper innovation and provides additional explanatory power behind LeanPD concepts through a dual focus on explicit and tacit knowledge. As knowledge is created and transformed, the ability to apply that learning across boundaries and across time is increasingly recognised as a key ingredient for International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2013 Vol. 26, No. 12, – , http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0951192X.2013.