The Savvy Consortium Presents

New Product Development and Innovation Engineering Conference XXX

People Collaborate to Achieve Innovation and Speed

May 20-21, 2021

Minneapolis and Virtual

Economic growth in 2021 energizes high performance product development and innovation engineering managers to address current situation challenges, find emerging technologies, try new initiatives, and apply proven methods that serve customers with greater energy on shorter timelines.

Savvy Conference XXX features eight presentations by product development and innovation engineering leaders. They present their challenges. They describe the emerging technologies and new knowledge they develop. They show how they applied their knowledge to various initiatives to improve people, processes and methods. Their successes will help you to break out into a product-driven economic growth pattern.

REGISTER today to “continuously advance science and technology for the betterment of your customers, colleagues and communities” (Savvy motto).

REGISTER TODAY!

Thursday, May 20

8:30 a.m.
Welcome to Conference XXX: Introductions
9:00 a.m.
Injecting Knowledge into Disruptive Innovation
  • Bob Melvin
  • Vice President, Engineering
  • Teledyne Benthos
Innovations are fueling economic recovery in many industries. Some disruptive technologies are happening at “warp speed.” Bob Melvin describes his blue ocean project that injects knowledge thinking into the lobstering industry helping to protect endangered whales. Bob describes the three success factors: disruptive innovation, knowledge-based product development and the ‘one chance.” Discovering disruptive innovation requires critical thinking. Bob will describe how his highly successful knowledge-driven product innovation system works to get the design right with the customer interest in mind. He discusses the risk factors in getting to market and that ‘there is one chance to get it right.’ He shows how up-front knowledge capture of the customer and the engineering needed will allow you to nail-it the first time and avoid unnecessary “pivots.”
10:30 a.m.
Make Functional Knowledge Experts Accessible
  • David Gregor
  • Director of Security and Reliability Engineering Excellence
  • Case New Holland, Inc.
What technologies make your product designs function and perform reliably and safely? Who are the persons with the technical knowledge needed to mentor your product design, development and those subject matter experts contributing to innovation engineering teams? How are these persons and their knowledge accessible, timely, and handed on in a professional way? David Gregor presents the Standards Development Group program he initiated to enable people possessing deep functional technology knowledge to collaborate in critical knowledge arenas while remaining compliant in the country of sale: product engineering, technology development and innovation engineering couple with compliance. David demonstrates the efficient, simple tool which product design, development, testing, and engineering teams need to access their source knowledge experts and build technical talent. Hint: Spreadsheets are not the tool!
12:30 p.m.
Visual Management Essentials for High Performance Global Development Teams
  • Chad Mitchell HDD R&D Engineering Director
  • Timothy Schmalz HDD R&D Principal Engineer
  • Western Digital
Engineer lockdown and distancing has fosters team communication for persons and collaborative teams in different time zones, different countries and different cultural practices. The focus is project communication: people knowledge, project decision making, and the tasks resulting from decisions made to speed up workflow. The flow depends on making visual: the right people, the right (timely) knowledge, right decisions and integrated workflow. A robust visual management system enables collaboration so the team can see, learn and act. Chad Mitchell and Tim Schmalz will describe a few essential use cases that Western Digital Development have seamlessly allowed for in-person teams to switch to full remote. They will share the ongoing transformation of their team as well as examples of scaled-Agile. Virtual boards & software tools integration have allowed WDC to continue with the human engineering aspects without co-location. This method of interaction continues to enable personal ownership, decision enablement, and self-organizing teams whose true virtue is a highly functional team whose members can all work from home. Chad and his team along with their colleagues from Western Digital are continually improving usability and functionality that high performance teams rely on for their work.
1:45 p.m.
Assess and Align Your Cross-Functional NPD Team
  • Katie Dixon
  • Continuous Improvement Engineer
  • STERIS Corporation
Midway through Katie Dixon’s development timeline, before commercial launch she assembled everyone in the organization who touches the project to conduct an NPD self-assessment. Each functional group crafted their problem statement, conducted a root cause analysis and identified the top 8 criteria for improvement. Katie facilitated small teams to achieve quick wins in their improvement goals. A first win was to enable the teams to interact with the product development people. The unexpected but critical benefits of the exercise were to: • create new knowledge of the product development process. • visualize the work of cross functional product development. • foster new appreciation, trust and respect for the persons who get the work done. Make sure you have this critical problem-solving savvy, motivation and person-to-person interaction that integrates the work of your product development operations to meet your 2021 deadlines.
3:00 p.m.
Adapt Visual Tools to Accelerate Collaboration, Resource Utilization and Completion of NPD Projects
  • Wendell Short
  • Director of Product Development
  • Sauder Corporation
What drives your system for utilizing your resources? Do you have a system? Wendell Short designed the Sauder system to serve customers with impossibly short deadlines for big box customer concept approval, concept development, experimentation, assembly verification, product launch and shipment. Wendell presents his experiences and insights for using tools, methods and thought processes to adapt to markets that involve end users who were not served until recently.

Friday, May 21

8:30 a.m.
Overcome Innovation Inertia: Develop Life-Changing Improvements for Customers and End Users
  • Mike Hess
  • Vice President, Corporate Technology & Innovation
  • Medtronic
In 2005, Mike Hess led a team of innovators at Medtronic to identify a medical device modification they believed would result in better outcomes for patients. A key customer pushed to try the modification, and after it was completed, patented and integrated, the results for patient improvement prove to be outstanding to this day. Mike and his team received Medtronic’s Patent of Distinction in 2020 for their contribution to patient well-being. Now, as Medtronic innovators look to “overcome inertia” in current product designs, they face similar challenges with the addition of new technologies, regulations and risk tolerances. Mike will show how he and his team push through the inertia and prevent valuable innovations from getting “squashed” on their way to fruition.
9:45 a.m.
Design a ‘Single Source of Truth’ for Critical Knowledge Transfer
  • Dean Testa
  • Director, Knowledge Management Office
  • The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company
Who are the technical experts and what about their critical knowledge ‘retiring’ soon? How do you capture their functional knowledge? How do you transfer knowledge? What are visual and software tools making critical knowledge searchable and accessible? Where is the “single source of truth” in your product design and innovation engineering operations? Dean Testa shows Goodyear’s remarkable system for knowledge management and transfer. He describes how to start a knowledge management program and shows Goodyear’s best practices/resources that you can use now, whether you are just getting started with knowledge management, or you need to take your current system to the next level.
11:00 a.m.
Electrification Technologies Drive Transportation Economics
  • David Augustine
  • VP of Product Management and Engineering
  • QM Power, Inc
How will electric motor technology impact your product design and business development? Whether or not your products depend on internal combustion engine power, there are electric motor technologies now emerging. Dave Augustine presents and demonstrates an emerging technology and functional motor and the impact it has on a variety of transportation sectors. Dave shows a visual of the technology innovation process and how it drives product design engineering.

WHO ATTENDS SAVVY LEARNING EVENTS?

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 1000 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.

Partial List of Firms attending Savvy Sponsored Product Development Events:

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.