The Savvy Consortium

New Product Development and Engineering Conference XXIV

Execution: Fuzzy Start – Design to Value – Flow to Production

Focus on Innovation, Customer Value, Agile Flow, and Finish

Thursday-Friday April 19-20, 2018

Hosted by: CA Technologies, Inc.

Lisle, IL

 

By our work, we product development engineering managers continually apply and advance science and technology for the profitable benefit of our customers, our company, our coworkers; and for the betterment of our economies and global customers and overseas colleagues.

The high-performance product engineering managers, presenting at this Savvy Conference, will present their agile design practices, visual work methods and problems solving practices. These resources aim to satisfy their customers, build engineering talent and grow the business.

Following the topics and speaker presentations, we feature the exclusive Savvy Consortium Benchmark Sessions. These sessions will make your product development work seem less difficult by seeing the best versions and standard practices of how others design, develop and launch new products.

Thursday, April 19

8:30 a.m.
Keynote Address: “Economic Growth – Essential and Achievable”
  • Peter Buca
  • Vice President Innovation
  • Parker Hannifin Corporation: Cleveland, OH
The central work of product development and innovation is to make money. The profits generated by this work benefits our people and firms by putting bread on the table and continuously advancing science and technology for the betterment of mankind. Economic Growth must result from this work. To achieve Economic Growth, innovators, engineers, scientists, technologists, et al., generate and apply critical knowledge.  Peter Buca presents the call for Economic Growth.  He presents a wide scope view of the essential drivers: innovative technology, a culture of high performance people and organizational leadership.   
10:30
Predictors of Production Challenges Born from Problem Solving During Design and Development
  • Chris DiAntonio
  • Neutron Generator Design Engineer
  • Sandia National Laboratories: Albuquerque, NM
The road to achieving operating excellence for any production system is always littered with numerous challenges. Many of these challenges are identified during the design and development phase of product realization and are confronted with problem solving efforts. The investigation during the problem solving inherently results in predictors that can be linked to the design problems faced during production in hindsight. By understanding these predictors and utilizing them to your advantage the designer can minimize the impact to downstream product. Several case studies will be presented that demonstrate the complexity yet reward of these predictors and having the ability to recognize proactively the learning opportunities of production.
1:00 p.m.
Design Problem: Solving the Right Problem
  • Helen Park
  • Project Manager
  • WetDesign, Inc: Los Angeles, CA
Complex product designs required design problem solving at several levels of the product systems architecture. Some call it the Kentou Phase his requires a team of people with expertise and passion to learn the design unknowns.    Helen Park calls this “Discovery Work.”  Helen presents her experiences at WetDesign in the Team Learning Culture which embodies this Discovery Work. The team challenges are many and familiar:  customer wants “Brilliant and Beautiful’ Fountain.  The design project has impossible deadlines, scope creep, resources constraints, and a chaotic culture of interpersonal dynamics.   Helen discovered the solution to these constraints is in finding the right problems often unseen.  She will describe developing the right solutions and involving the team members in the right interactions.  These tasks enable prompt decisions, innovative collaboration and satisfying work that moves the project to design to successful completion. Helen Park’s “Discovery Work’ is the key component to product design and development work.  Discovery Work should enable development teams to collaborate better and with higher work satisfaction.
3:00 p.m.
Applying Agile – Multi-Discipline Collaboration to Improve Product Design and Development
  • Panel of Collaborators
  • CA Technologies Agile Leaders
Growth is the perennial call for new product design and development teams.  Delivering valuable customer outcomes is the demand from executive management. Continuous improvement in people, processes and tools is essential. Moreover, achieving growth requires continuous improvement in the beliefs and practices for organizing, planning and executing NPD projects that meet customer and business expectations, deliver innovations, and build a sense of personal work satisfaction. CA Technologies has assembled this “Agile” panel of high performance Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Architects, UX and Technical Managers to brief the Conference on their Agile Transformation journey over the past 9 years.  After opening remarks from each panelist, the panel expects to do an extensive Agile Q&A with the audience to share their learnings.

Friday, April 20

8:30 a.m.
A Healthy Culture is the Co-efficient of Innovation
  • Sheila Peyraud
  • Chief Technology Officer (ret.)
  • The Donaldson Company: Minneapolis, MN
The Current Passion for Economic Growth is a Call for Innovation.  New Product Development and Engineering managers, teams and executives in many companies may have lost some ground.  Often caused by project pressures, making impossible schedules, poorly led cultures.    The time to get healthy and 'make it happen’ is now.  Sheila Peyraud presents her practical experiences in transforming a R&D work culture into an Innovation Culture.  She recounts her experiences enabling engineers to solve problems, failures are good for learning.  The human side of technical reviews, acknowledging people and their personal contributions, are just a few essentials of the healthy culture. Sheila will provide from her experiences a wide range of healthy human work culture behaviors.  These behaviors, team, functional management and executive level enable people to innovate and experience work satisfaction.  Healthy Innovation Culture is essential; it drives innovation, economic growth and work satisfaction.  Conference participants can experiment and adapt what works based in Sheila Peyraud’s beliefs, principles and practices.
10:30 a.m.
Ready for Production: Challenges and Basic Execution
  • Ken Kreafle
  • Chief Engineer Production- Avalon 05
  • General Manager- Production Engineering
  • Toyota Engineering/Manufacturing TEMA
Product complexity and product proliferation are current challenges that call for process improvements. These improvements are needed to make schedules and meet costs in a customer driven product development and engineering environment. Ken Kreafle presents his experiences integrating product design with manufacturing at the production launch process stage. Ken’s experience includes Chief Engineer for the 05 Toyota Avalon (product design and product manufacturing). Ken will describe how the basic new product production launch is improved to eliminate recurring problems. He will include the basic tools, culture practices and precepts that every manufacturing company must adapt for lean and agility.
1:00 p.m.
Savvy Practices: The Way to Improve NPD Execution
  • Todd Stute
  • Director of Corporate Process Improvement
  • Western Digital Corporation: San Jose, CA
“Tasks seem less difficult to adapt when you see how others do them” is the Savvy Consortium premise for benchmarking best practices. Todd Stute facilitates the discussion of Savvy Practices presented by the Savvy Conference XXIV Presenters.
3:30 p.m.
Wrap-Up

WHO ATTENDS SAVVY CONFERENCES?

Design engineering managers, department heads, chief engineers, functional department engineers, product engineers/marketers, directors of product engineering, change management pilot leaders, product test engineering managers, process improvement managers, product engineering development team members and leaders, and all who are responsible for improving product innovation, product development and process improvement in their product engineering operations. The conference is not open to academics, consultants, authors or gurus.

Over 800 people have participated in Savvy conferences and learning events. They are design engineers, systems engineers, technical and scientific people; product development teams leaders, knowledge specialists, engineering departments heads, engineering support group leaders, continuous improvement managers, process excellence managers, talent build managers, knowledge system managers, and others whose mission is people development, process improvement and productivity increase.

Firms attending Savvy Sponsored Product Development Knowledge Events the partial list of firms below:

Toro, Eaton, Timken, Dana, Sauder, Medtronic, McDonalds, General Mills, TSI, Goodyear, Cooper, Amano Pioneer, Diebold, John Deere, Pella, Genie, Pella, Schram, Cabot, Medtronic, St. Jude Medical, Boston Scientific, Nexen, Masonite, Steris/US Endoscopy, Inovonics, UTAS Aerospace, Wil-burt, Cabot Electronics, Cooper, CNH, GE Medical, Crown, Keithley, Knowles, Parker, Actuant, Deluxe, Tennant, Henny Penny, 3M, Shram, Diamond, Emerson, Terex, Ditch Witch, Waterous, HGST, RT technologies, Altec, Toyota, Saris, Andersen, Wet Design, Sub Zero, Harley Davidson, Autobag, CA Companies, Beckman Coulter, Donaldson, Seagate and participants from many other manufacturers that are implementing continuous improvement in their product design engineering organizations.

SAVE THE DATE: APRIL 19-20, 2018

Savvy Conference XXIV
Venue: CA TECHNOLOGIES, LISLE, IL

Plan for you / your colleagues to participate Savvy Conference XXIV. 20% Discount offered to groups of three or more from the same company.