Case Studies
Equipment Supplier
Client Description
The client designs, manufactures and markets optical modules and components that provide fiber connectivity for network equipment vendors’ own products.
The Objective
Reduce the new product time to market by improving the effectiveness of the design process and its performance to schedule. The client was at risk in satisfying their customers expectation
for time to market. This also required the need to reduce the cycle time and improve the First Pass Yield of many supporting processes and functions.
The Approach
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STRUCTURE: A leadership team consisting of the Vice President of R&D Engineering, the Director of Engineering Services, and the Affinity Partners Program Manager was formed to define, direct, and monitor the Improvement Process. After key issues and opportunities were identified, Barrier Removal Teams (BRT) were formed to make process improvements in supporting sub-processes and key mainline process segments.
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MEASUREMENTS: As very few metrics existed at any level, the key was to install a few, high level, simple metrics (cycle time and performance to schedule) to drive behavior change. These were augmented with the implementation of second level, cycle time and first pass yield metrics in key sub processes that had bottlenecks and barriers. Since none of the key sub processes had project lists, that was the obvious and necessary first step.
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PROTOCOL: BRTs were used to drive the improvements by using a multi-step approach starting with aligned overall objectives that were broken down into supporting, measurable and congruent sub-objectives. Project and subproject lists were developed, baseline processes and sub processes were mapped with differences in complexities noted, and resource assignments were generated. Performance objectives were specified which lead to the identification of barriers to these desired objectives, and subsequently the implementation process to remove these barriers. Through-out this process, Affinity Partners monitored, trained, coached at all levels of the organization and provided direction and proposed solutions without interrupting the normal flow of the client business.
The Deliverables
- Project prioritization process
- Resource utilization, capacity, planning tool
- More complete, rigorous, disciplined product development process including mandatory design reviews, formal requirements documents, process ownership, and post mortem learning capability
- Universal scheduling tools which included the integration of key sub processes
- Regular project schedule reviews
- More complete integration of resources in targeted Southeast Asian countries
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Process improvement/barrier removal methodology
for key sub processes and their interfaces
The Results
Key sub-process cycle times were reduced in the range of 10% to over 65% in some cases, large increases in output without extra resources. Phase review segment project cycle times have been reduced by 25%. Phase-gate review on time to schedule has improved from less than 35% to almost 80%.
Comments
Affinity Partners reviews progress every fiscal quarter to ensure that continued progress is being made and that the Barrier Removal Process is being followed as new issues arise. This is necessary since an average project is 18 months long and the Affinity Partners onsite work was 9 months in duration.
