Managing the Design Factory: A Product Developer's Toolkit

Author: Donald G.Reinertsen

Making Profits not Products

花费，单位成本、产品性能、生产工期这4个核心展开。

设计工厂的目标是为了最经济的解决问题，制造利润

通过对信息、反馈、组织、设计流程、框架体系、产品规格、工具及如何管理等展开来讲如何达到目标。

Introduce

Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing has probably had more impact on actual business economics than anything that has happened since the assembly line since early 1980s.

There are no best practices

Best practices are only "best" in certain contexts and to achieve certain objectives.

Two tools

Thinking tools: to understand why we must do certain things. know-why

Action tools: to deal with the problems of doing.

While both types of tools are necessary to succeed, the thinking tools are most fundamental. They enable you to understand why you are doing thins, not simply what to do.

Into the Design Factory

There are 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 products introduction can make a partially completed project worthless overnight. If your bank account loses half its capital value every year, you would be outraged.

Making Profits Not Products

Design Factory exists for one purpose: to make a profit

Profit= sales price - cost

Our sales price is a measure of the value that people attach to our output. If we fail to create sufficient value for customers, then they will spend their money on something else. Sales price is the customer's message that we have done somethings useful.

Our cost is a muasure of how well we use time and physical resources. A manufacturer who is efficient at converting material, labor, and energy into products is rewarded with profits.

Do more of the things that help you achieve your objective. Our objective is profit, we must determine which things in the infinite list of things we could possibly do will actually help us make money.

System Economic Model

Four parameters: Development expense, unit cost, Product Performance, and Schedule.

Author: Donald G.Reinertsen

Making Profits not Products

Introduce

Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing has probably had more impact on actual business economics than anything that has happened since the assembly line since early 1980s.

There are no best practices

Best practices are only "best" in certain contexts and to achieve certain objectives.

Two tools

Thinking tools: to understand why we must do certain things. know-why

Action tools: to deal with the problems of doing.

While both types of tools are necessary to succeed, the thinking tools are most fundamental. They enable you to understand why you are doing thins, not simply what to do.

Into the Design Factory

There are 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 products introduction can make a partially completed project worthless overnight. If your bank account loses half its capital value every year, you would be outraged.

Making Profits Not Products

Design Factory exists for one purpose: to make a profit

Profit= sales price - cost

Our sales price is a measure of the value that people attach to our output. If we fail to create sufficient value for customers, then they will spend their money on something else. Sales price is the customer's message that we have done somethings useful.

Our cost is a muasure of how well we use time and physical resources. A manufacturer who is efficient at converting material, labor, and energy into products is rewarded with profits.

Do more of the things that help you achieve your objective. Our objective is profit, we must determine which things in the infinite list of things we could possibly do will actually help us make money.

System Economic Model

Four parameters: Development expense, unit cost, Product Performance, and Schedule.

It's all about Information

Information theory

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We must determine how to generate information efficiency. Second, we must generate the information that is of greatest value.

Maximizing information: the magic number 50%

Product Architecture: The Invisible Design

Like the development process, the architecture of the product can be optimized to achieve certain objectives, key economic objectives from expense, cost, performance, and schedule.

UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES

First, we must make decisions with regard to how modular to make the product. Second, we must partition the design to control the impact of variability. Third, we need to manage the internal interfaces of the design.

Modularity

How modularity affects development expenses.

It can reduce the communications overhead on a team, allowing designers to concentrate more time on value-added tasks .By hiding these implementation details other module designers only need to know how the interfaces work.

Note: The benefit of reduced expenses will only come when a system is partitioned properly and the interfaces are properly defend.

Reusing modules can save enormous amounts of design time of projects.

It permits us to do concurrent developments of subsystems rather than having to develop them sequentially.

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Segregating Variability

What Do I Do?

1.Do your math

A good first step is to assign a financial analyst to support every development team and ensure that each team has acceptable economic models to guide their day-to-day decisions.

2.Use decision rules

The more you frame decisions as economic choices, the more your people will adopt the same method.

3.Pay attention to capacity utilization

4.Pay attention to batch size

5.Respect variability

6.Think clearly about risk

7.Think system

8.Respect the people

9.Design the process thoughtfully

10.Pay attention to architecture

11.Deeply understand the customer

12.Elminate useless controls

13.Get to the front lines

14.Avoid slogans