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Zusatztext Dr. Paul Borrill Chief Scientist! Sun Microsystems A brilliant and unique perspective on the economic and business dimensions of product design. Reinertsen's insights into the human and economic dimensions of product design are outstanding. Informationen zum Autor Donald G. Reinertsen is head of Reinertsen & Associates, a firm that specializes in new product development. He also teaches at the California Institute of Technology and has attracted a worldwide following among managers, designers, and engineers. He holds an engineering degree from Cornell and an MBA from Harvard. He and his family live in Redondo Beach, California. Klappentext The first book to put the principles of World Class Manufacturing to work in the development process, Managing the Design Factory combines the powerful analytical tools of queuing, information, and system theories with the proven ideas of organization design and risk management. The result: a methodical approach to consistently hit the "sweet spot" of quality, cost, and time in developing any product. Reinertsen illustrates these concepts with concrete examples drawn from his work with many leading companies across different industries. Unlike other books that promote rules and rituals based on benchmarking "best practices", this book focuses on practical tools that account for varied situations. He breaks new ground with a disciplined, quantitative approach for making decisions on critical issues: When should we use a sequential or concurrent process? Centralized or decentralized control? Functional or team organizations? Full of practical techniques, concrete examples, and solid general principles, this is a real toolkit for product developers. Chapter 1 Into the Design Factory Imagine that own a business with a large bank account that pays no interest. You would be unhappy. Now imagine that this bank account loses half its capital value every year. You would be outraged. Yet this is exactly the situation that most companies find themselves in as they try to manage their product development process. They have high levels of investment in partially completed designs, but these investments earn them nothing until the products are introduced. These investments are at risk, because a competitor's product introduction can make a partially completed project worthless overnight. In effect, they have a large non-interest-bearing asset that loses its capital value very rapidly. There is however one key difference. Most companies have no clue how big this asset is, or what sort of return they make on it. This chapter introduces the concept of the Design Factory, the foundation upon which we will build when we introduce more powerful analytical tools later in the book. We will look at the goals of the Design Factory, its output, its inventory, and will examine its similarities and differences from the manufacturing factory. I have chosen the term Design Factory for our product development process because it gives us a useful context within which to view this process. By approaching the problem as a manufacturing problem, we can exploit certain tools and concepts that have proved useful for repetitive processes like manufacturing. There is a good reason for viewing design through the eyes of a manufacturing manager. In general, more careful management thought and more insightful review of experience have occurred in the area of manufacturing than in the area of product development. This is true in part because we have better accounting systems in manufacturing, which makes it easier to assess performance. It is also true because we spend more money in this area, causing it to receive a higher level of management attention and scrutiny. It may also be true because manufacturing is an inherently repetitive process and therefore more likely to produce learning than a nonrepetitive process, like product development....
