Thursday, April 25

9:00 a.m.
Product Development Engineering for Customer Assets Utilization
  • Justin Clarine
  • Vice President – Engineering
  • Loram Corporation
How do high performance Product Design Engineering people enable customers to use their assets?  Justin Clarine presents an insightful, strategic view of how Loram’s PD&E people use advanced design engineering principles and practices. Justin will describe and discuss this dynamic model of developing new products for customers that have large assets, who require speed, performance and reliability.
10:45 a.m.
Functional Engineering and Value Streaming Intersection at the Matrix
  • Ken Bonenberger
  • Sr. Program Manager
  • STERIS Corporation | Surgical Solutions
Knowledge workers in product design and development engineering depend on well-organized operations that enable lean innovation and agile processes that focus on customer value interests. Ken Bonenberger will describe a NPD&E paradigm for organizing innovation and customer focus called the Value Stream Matrix. This matrix comprises engineering functions and value streams. It poses Opportunities for operational excellence and innovation. It simultaneously gives rise to Challenges and Constraints for knowledge worker Collaboration. Ken Bonenberger presents the VS Matrix system elements. This is a bench mark discussion of the pros/cons, drivers/constraints inherent in adapting a value stream matrix system and its elements.
1:00 p.m.
Knowledge: the Basis for Successful New Product Development
  • Paul Kurth
  • Knowledge Based Product Development Leader (ret)
  • The Toro Company

Achieving growth in competitive markets requires technology and engineering knowledge creation and flow in the product development and engineering operations at Toro. Paul Kurth describes the early challenges Toro faced from lean principles that did not produce critical knowledge at the design engineering level. Paul demonstrates how A3 thinking produced a new, high level ‘body of work’ from design engineers. Critical knowledge resulted that improved new product quality, customer satisfying differentiation and engineering worker satisfaction. Paul will demonstrate tools, A3 thinking, AR-VR visualization. He demonstrates the powerful effect of tools that raised engineers’ engagement, passion for their work, and talent building for knowledge generation and value flow that raised customer interests and satisfaction levels.
2:00 p.m.
Crisis Project Management-Collaboration Enables NPD&E Operations
  • Steve Van Zee
  • Engineering Manager
  • Vermeer Corporation
Product development and engineering people and individuals typically work in offices/spaces/equipment that offer stable work environments. What happens when this environment is disrupted? Does your NPD operation have a plan when a disruption occurs? Stave van Zee describes the day of disruption, danger and distraction when mother nature unleashed her fury in the form of a Tornado on the Vermeer product engineering operations.
3:00 p.m.
Dynamic Customers Drive Process Improvements and People Excellence
  • Todd Stute
  • Director: Corporate Process Excellence
  • Western Digital Corporation

A Collaborative and Very Visual Discussion of Dynamic Customer Needs: Make Your NPD Process Dynamic. The conference product development engineering managers participating from the variety of industries will cross collaborate and discuss the key process and people elements they are working on in their NPD&E operations: ♣ Integrating Upcoming Technologies ♣ Dynamic Learning Cycles Generate Customer Value ♣ Reducing Design Time Using $ economics tradeoff decisions ♣ What does Lean look like in Phase Gate ♣ Innovation Throughout Process: not only at the Fuzzy Front End ♣ Reduce Time to Launch: sharper and savvy decision tools and managers.