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.