9:30 a.m.
Clean Install a Flexible ‘Agile’ Process on High Profile Program with High Talent Team
- Ken Bonenberger
- Senior Engineering Manager
- Steris – US Endoscopy
Agile processes such as the Scale system and comparable processes are complex. Ken Bonenberger is adapting the agile process in a simple, understandable way making the process learning cycles pay off with high day to day productivity on the product design and development. Ken will describe his experiences using cadences, visual methods and practices on a Steris ‘high profile’ life science product and service development project. Ken will show how the team adapts essential agile and lean practices to the front end of this project. He will show results from experiments with agile events, prototype deliverables and work board visuals to meet project schedules.
11:00 a.m.
Transfer Your Critical Science and Engineering Knowledge Before Your Experts Retire
- Barbara Stamatis
- Manager
- Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co.
The aging work force: retirements and lost critical technical knowledge. Barbara Stamatis will present her experiences, practices and tools collaborating with her colleagues to enable an efficient, comprehensive transfer of critical knowledge. Barbara will discuss the delicate challenges and ways to enable solutions working with people of high talent and real contributions to the economic success of their firm. She will sketch out several of the visual tools that enable the expert and the novice to collaborate in the critical knowledge transfer.
1:00 p.m.
Prime Challenge: Understanding the Customer Problem
- Stephanie Westphal
- Director of New Product Development
- Tennant Corporation
Understanding customer needs/problems is important to understand what value means to the customer. Stephanie Westphal will show how this is the prime task developing concepts for stage 1 of the Tennant NPI process. She will demonstrate her experiences making development projects flow downstream from this important first step. She will show how her teams overcome the typical problems to make their deadlines: customer interests that change during the project timeline, decisions not made promptly, and team members having unplanned work.
3:00 p.m.
Strategic Topic Panel: Diverse Talent Enables Collaboration on NPI Teams
Many NPI teams currently comprise people of diverse ethnicity, culture, and gender. This diversity enables critical learning from different points of view: wide understanding of customer wants/needs, technology options, creative design engineering contributions. And, the all-important ‘personal work satisfaction.’
Women engineers, though typically fewer in number on NPI development team members, nevertheless contribute to the success of their teams and to their work satisfaction.
