Friday, April 29, 2011
TRIZ and Lean Product & Process Development
I’m just back from a great week at the Lean Product and Process Development Exchange in San Diego. See www.lppde.org for the full program, and for planning for the next 2 meeting, September in Gothenburg, Sweden and April 2012 in Indianapolis. LPPDE is a great match for TRIZ, and I got to explore some of the areas for integration in a workshop.
For the TRIZ readers, LPPDE is a system for improving the speed and predictability of product and process development. It uses some of the concepts of lean manufacturing (remove waste, remove non-value added activities, create flow of work) but has many other features that are unique to the development process. Of particular interest to TRIZ practioners is the emphasis on understanding the relationships between elements of the system, and on re-use of the system knowledge, much of which is recorded as trade-off curves.
So, the obvious connection is that LPPDE teaches people to collect trade-off data, and TRIZ teaches people to eliminate trade-offs, and the realities of the business world teach people to choose very carefully which trade-offs to eliminate and which to tolerate.
A slightly less obvious connection is the TRIZ method of using the resources that are in the problem to solve the problem, and to consider resources very broadly (energy, information, properties/attributes of objects, resources of the environment, as well as objects, waste materials, etc., that are in the system.) The LPPDE practioners very quickly saw that if they make an extensive survey of the resources and the properties and functions of the resources in a problem area when first dealing with a problem, and put that survey into their knowledge capture system, they would have a great acceleration in their ability to solve future problems in that area and related ones.
I’ll continue exploring this area in the next few months—would appreciate comments from readers who are TRIZ and LPPDE simultaneous practioners. Thanks in advance!
