In an earlier blog we talked about the Lean concept of Cadence in organic terms as a heartbeat. And then we moved out of the comfort of that pat analogy to suggest that other periodic organic processes might serve as a better analogy of cadence in Product Development in consideration of its extended cycle times. Today let’s move back to the analogy of the heartbeat and explore the concept of Perfect Cadence.
If we look at takt time on a production line as a two beat cycle — in one cycle the line advances, in the other the value adding tasks are executed – the heartbeat and our circulatory flow do serve as clarifying models for the Lean elements of Cadence and Flow.
Heartbeats have been in the news recently with the minor dustup over the suspicions of privilege in Dick Cheney’s successful heart transplant. Below that opinionated noise there is a far more interesting story, and one that has caused my Lean head to spin — continuously — and to muse. This other story begs the question of what would happen to the relationship of Cadence to Flow, and to our heartbeat analogy if there were no driving beat but rather continuous flow.
Prior to his heart transplant, Dick Cheney had an LVAD (left ventricle assist device) implanted to help support his failing heart and to keep him alive until a candidate heart could be found. There are over 10,000 heart disease patients who now have one of these LVADs embedded.
The development and adoption of artificial hearts have been constrained by the rapid wear and tear on the implanted mechanical pumps, as well as by the difficulties of supplying power to the devices. The hundred days of life extension given to Barney Clark by the Jarvik 7 heart in the 1970’s set a course for medical engineering research, but the goal of a natural life with an artificial heart has remained unfulfilled. Because of the practical limitations of artificial hearts, they have been used exclusively as devices to prolong life while patients waited for an available heart for transplant.
In the 1980’s, a doctor-engineer was inspired by an experience he recalled. A decade earlier on a volunteer mission to Africa, he had observed how water was pulled from wells by an Archimedes Screw, essentially an auger in a pipe. His inspiration and subsequent research led to the development of heart devices that moved blood not by pumping, but by means of compact turbines. Early fears that the rotating blades of the turbine would do damage to blood cells were allayed and this technology became the basis for LVADs.
LVADs are not intended as artificial hearts, but rather as ‘crutches’ for diseased hearts. Because of their compact technology they provided mobility and freedom from hospitalization for patients awaiting transplant. Astonishingly, LVADs also demonstrated the ability to help reverse heart disease apparently in the same way a crutch relieves the burden on a leg and lets it heal. But even greater astonishment awaited as the LVAD patient population grew and flourished.
In 2003, a patient from Central America came to the United States and was fitted with an LVAD. Communicating through a language barrier, he misunderstood the instructions for him to return frequently. Upon release from the hospital, he disappeared. A year later, he returned for a checkup and explained that he had not returned sooner because he felt so great. During his physical, astonishingly, he had no pulse. His heart had given out entirely and he was being kept alive solely by the circulation provided by his implanted turbine.
Since that experience, an artificial heart based upon dual turbines has been developed and has been implanted successfully into a small number of patients as a treatment of last resort. For now, those patients thrive and there is optimism that research has embarked on a path to a practical, long lasting artificial heart.
The circulation that results from these turbine-based artificial hearts gives continuous flow (Perfect Flow?) but no pulse, no cadence. The critical value-add process of gas exchange in the lungs can be accomplished as the blood flows continuously. So does Perfect Cadence result from the absence of the no-value-added-but-necessary half of our two part cycle? Is it achieved when we are able to provide all necessary value contributions under the condition of continuous flow? I think in theory it is, but as I try to visualize this in practice the only image I can summon is Lucille Ball laboring and stuffing her face at the candy factory.
Cadence is often a conscious feature. We consciously create cadence to regulate workflow. This enabling control feature also carries a cost, and the cost is that it keeps us from Perfect Flow. If Perfect Cadence is that which enables Perfect Flow, then the approach to Perfect Cadence is the cadence that results as the duration of the no-value-added-but-necessary part of the cycle approaches a limit of zero. This may not exist in the organic model that we choose to apply to our knowledge work, but it likely has conceptual value in areas like production where, like in the world of medical devices, both organic and mechanical models apply concurrently.
Cadence.
In the world of Lean, the timing of the complex dance of syncopated work is managed through cadence.
The most visible and familiar example of cadence in Lean systems is the concept of takt time that controls the production line. The work of each station along a production line or in a work cell is executed within the same time-duration bounding-box. The concept of cadence enables load leveling, the act of shifting work from one production workstation to a neighbor so that the time of execution at all workstations can be balanced to fit into the shortest, most efficient takt time. The most efficient takt time produces the most efficient total cycle time and serves the high-level goals of Lean production systems.
One of the five fundamental principles of Lean is Flow, the uninterrupted movement of value across boundaries. Cadence is the heartbeat that determines the flux of value within the system. The analogy of a heartbeat is doubly appropriate.
Like a heartbeat, the cadence of production has a systolic stage that forces flow, as work in progress moves from one station to then next. And the cadence has a diastolic stage of low flow pressure, during the execution of the tasks at each station.
The second valuable aspect of the analogy of the heartbeat is its organic nature. With increasing focus on knowledge work and management efforts to humanize the workplace in the pursuit of greater productivity, mechanical models have been increasingly displaced by organic, systemic models. And so the heart organ replaces the ticking clock or the metronome as the timing event.
In Lean Product Development also, cadence serves to both coordinate and drive the timing of events. But unlike in the manufacture and assembly of product, the cycle times of product development are much longer and the model of the beat-per-second human heart is useful, but less insightful. An example of the use of cadence in Lean Product Development is the use of Integrating Events in Set Based Concurrent Design. These events are used to put innovation ‘on a clock’ but in a way that is not counterproductive to the creative work.
The period of this development cadence extends over several weeks. For what kind of creature does this describe their heartbeat? Obviously, none, and so some other organic cadence function likely serves as a better model. The menstrual cycle leaps to mind — appropriate by period of cadence, by its somewhat variable regularity, and by its key role in the creative (innovation?) process. Of interest to me is the time variance between the two strokes of the integration event cycle, if fact of any cadenced cycle. It gets me thinking.
In a heartbeat, the two halves of the ‘lub-dub’ cycle are approximately equal in duration. In a factory setting, the division of takt time between the task of adding value and the task of movement to the next station are ideally not approximately equal in time, but rather the value-add time is maximized and the non-value-add-but-necessary time is minimized.
Allow me to detour for a quick, justification side bar here. A common caution to Lean practitioners is to avoid blindly applying the tools of Lean, but rather to use them with an understanding of the underlying principles that guide their application, the ‘why’ of the tools. Like the standards that we have developed to make our work more efficient and more effective, the principles of Lean themselves must be analyzed and sometimes challenged in the cause of continuous improvement. And so I embark on a perhaps Quixotic dive into thinking about flow and cadence.
My thinking calls into focus another fundamental principle of Lean, the pursuit of Perfection. Principle based Lean practitioners recognize Perfection, the idealized future state, as being more of a compass heading than a destination. And so the question is begged, what is Perfect Flow? Is it the reduction to zero of non-value-add but perhaps-necessary time? And if that is so, does that mean no movement (so no flow) or that value-add can be done during movement? We’ll rip this apart in our next blog. And we invite you to send your thoughts on this and all future blogs in to us to help guide our thinking and our learning.
And so as we speak of the next blog and of the value of cadence, we are announcing that we will now put a cadence to our postings, to make it easier and more predictable for those who wish to follow. We will put up some new thoughts on the first and third Tuesdays of the month, with the occasional ‘organic’ variation to our regularity. And on occasion, we may throw up an intermediary blog as we get something off our mind and into words. And, again, we are interested in your feedback, so please share your thoughts with us.
In a recent meeting at a client, the CEO said that the flow of new products was the lifeblood of his organization. The company relied on product development to establish its competitive position in the marketplace. That sentiment can be generalized to most companies. But what we’ve observed as we visit a wide variety of companies is that most of the competitive energy around product development is focused internally. There is more observable ‘competing within’ than ‘competing on behalf of’ their companies.
We understand that a significant portion of the basis of this in-fighting ties to the unconscious, habitual application of the management principles of Frederick Taylor. Current leaders of product development appear to collectively understand there is a need for change, but lack the tools to overcome deeply entrenched, counterproductive management habits.
Our last great chance to shuck off this flawed and self-limiting management style occurred during World War II. Training-Within-Industry (TWI) was the successful Army-led effort to create an efficient workforce out of the men and women entering the factories, replacing former factory workers who were now on the front lines. While Henry Ford a half-century earlier had lamented that every set of hands came attached to a whole, questioning person, TWI embraced the whole being and taught workers not only the key point of what they were building but went so far as to explain WHY they were key points. TWI’s “Every person must be seen as an individual” was a clear precursor to Lean’s “Respect and trust your workers”.
The improvements brought to management during the war were lost as the returning tide of ex-soldiers reclaimed their spots along the assembly lines and in the offices of the factories. Management reverted to pre-war ways.
At the same time, MacArthur was bringing TWI to war-ravaged Japan. TWI, by then reformed as a private company, helped reestablish an industrial base in Japan. And the more effective management practice that had been ‘piloted’ in American factories during the war became the basis of Japanese practice. This exportation of competitive advantage flew under the radar in optimistic and prosperous post-war America.
Early in my career, I worked as a research engineer in Japan at electronics giant, Sharp Corporation. As a part of my basic training, I was led through a problem-solving approach (now associated with Lean) that combined the benefits of the Deming Cycle (PDCA) and the A3 communication tool. When I returned to the states and throughout my career (which has centered on product development) I was regularly challenged by the chaotic environment in which we execute Product Development, especially in comparison to my experience in Japan.
When Lean Product Development emerged as a new management framework in the early 21st century, I saw that it reflected what I had observed first hand in Japan. As I was drawn deeper into an understanding and appreciation of the system, I came full circle back to A3s. Through the A3 insights in the writings of Durward Sobek and John Shook, and in private conversations with Sobek, I realized the power of PDCA and A3s. I also realized that my basic training had provided me with an advantage that had been displaced on my return to the States – a personal microcosm of the abandonment of our advantage when the World War II veterans returned home.
Peter Drucker was a results-based champion of Frederick Taylor and of Taylor’s contribution to economic growth in the 20th century. But in the 1980s, with the emergence and expansion of the knowledge workforce, Drucker realized that the limitations and problems inherent in Taylor’s management methods were inappropriate and ineffective in the information age and the knowledge economy. To achieve necessary high productivity from this new class of worker, something better than blunt force management was needed.
So let’s think of product development, executed by knowledge workers, as a competitive event. Like an athletic contest in which we encounter an advantaged opponent, we need a game changer. The obvious game changer is a field leveler. It is the widespread embrace and adoption of that American creation, PDCA, the scientific method applied to knowledge work, and its application through its companion tool, the A3.
A parting thought is that to just pick up these tools and apply them at a tool based level will blunt their effectiveness. They must be applied at a principle-based level with a full understanding of their motivational and developmental value in the context of a larger system. But more about that in a later blog.
I had a moment of “Eureka” about a month ago. It happened while I was thinking about the way people develop products. Product development is a tricky proposition, but you don’t need to take my word for it, many people have the battle scars to prove it or bald “project management” tires from constantly jamming on the brakes and then hitting the accelerator. You’ll understand what I mean by ‘flow is faster’.
It’s easy to describe the trance I was in when I had had my eureka moment. Anyone that’s traveled for business can picture the scene. I was vaguely watching a reality show, on one of the gazillion hotel cable channels, while checking email and reviewing a presentation I would be delivering the following morning. I settled on a commercial (probably had something to do with food), and waited for the regularly scheduled show to come back on. It was about five minutes into the program. To be honest, I can’t remember the shows name or what channel it was on, but it featured four highly skilled military experts as they competed in feats of strength, speed, and intelligence. By the end of the episode, and three challenges, there was one ultimate winner. The contestants all had very similar backgrounds and experience, except for one whom I’ll refer to as an old-timer. He was a 40 something retired Army Special Ops going up against three 20 something’s who looked ready to cause others pain. I remember thinking “I feel for you old man, but you’re going down…”
The first challenge was a multi-laser course. Each contestant had to crawl, walk, jump and sometimes flip through a series of laser beams. Then they had to hit a switch and repeat the whole process in reverse to get back to the starting line. The challenge was a little frustrating because if a contestant broke a laser beam it would set off an alarm and they would have to reset and start over. First up was old-timer and as I watched him take his time (and I mean Take. His. Time.). He took so much time they went to commercial and, to my surprise, when they came back from the break he finally finished; albeit with an unimpressive time of 4 plus minutes. I remember laughing out loud, as the course was not that long and I thought, “watch out old-timer, here come the young bucks…” I continued to watch and the most unexpected thing happened, time after time the young bucks tried to speed through the course. The faster they went, the quicker they would trip a laser and have to start over. When it was all said and done, old-timer was the fastest.
Here’s the part that made me drop my laptop and pay total attention to this crazy show. When they interviewed old-timer on his first win they asked him how he did it. He said, “flow is faster”. He actually said something like “smooth is faster” or “slow is faster”. More important though, was what he said next. It was something like “I slowed down, surveyed my obstacles and challenges, then I tried my best to prioritize my skill and capability. I knew I needed to keep the clock in mind, but my overall goal was to finish without error”. At this point I know I said “Holy Shit” out loud. I remember thinking that old-timer just explained product development! Flow is faster.
Think about what he said and think about the day-to-day challenges when developing products, engineering, and manufacturing. People are constantly trying to rush a change request or release something to the shop floor without verification. Time and time again companies try to produce a product only to find lead-time was atrocious and on-time-delivery is in jeopardy. Loopbacks, communication problems, pointing fingers, it all comes down to one simple thing, which I can guarantee isn’t easy. Flow. If you can map out and master the flow of your product development system and get everyone to take ownership and buy into a defined system, no short-cutting, and no panicked reactions, you will finish strong. Slow down, observe your obstacles and challenges, prioritize your skills and capabilities and keep an eye on the end goal. I’m confident that if you give it a chance you will find that “flow” really is faster, but you don’t need to take my word for it. Listen to the old-timer.
Flow is faster. He won the whole thing.
My name is Matt and I ride mopeds – I’m not talking about the scooters or step through motorcycles that you see cruising around cities and college these days, I mean mopeds. Small, typically old, motorized 2-wheeled vehicles that have moveable pedals allowing a person to pedal the moped like a bicycle if they a) run out of gas b) need to go ‘stealth’ c) don’t feel like push starting the ‘ped or d) feel like exercising. This post and hopefully a few more will follow my very own product development design process as I restore and customize one of my vintage mopeds – the Kreidler MP 19 pictured in the slideshow above and the image below. This post explains the process I went through after deciding the seat needed some attention.
I had planned to have the original seat reupholstered, but after removing the cover and the foam I noticed that there was a bit of rust on the metal seat pan as well as some cracks in vital areas.
The Design Process
After seeing the condition of the old seat pan I decided it was time for the old to become new. Rather than purchasing a new seat, I decided to use what I do day-in and day-out at EAC. I would design one and the try to build it on my own. I like to think that I’m a pretty good engineer and I have all the Creo software tools, so the designing wasn’t going to be a problem, but this will be my first real metalworking project.
Step 1: Design
The first step in my design process was figuring out what I wanted my new seat to be. Do I want it hinged like the original or have it rigidly attached to the frame? Do I want to tuck the taillight under the rear fairing? What gauge metal should I use, etc.? After getting my requirements I continued to think of my metal working capabilities as well as the tools available. Realizing that I don’t have much firsthand experience in metal fabrication and only basic shop tools, hammers, bench vise, angle grinder, and a welder, I knew I had to keep the parts and the design simple.
After many hours (and beers) contemplating my requirements and fabrication abilities, it was time to sit down and design the new seat in Creo Parametric. Inside of Creo, I used the sheet metal functionality to design my metal parts. The sheet metal functionality allowed me to design the parts the way that they would be built. For example, start with a flat sheet in the shape of the base and add a couple of 90-degree walls. Then add a couple of rounds and corner cutouts to get the base of the seat.
The other sheet metal parts were created in a similar fashion as the base. I decided to mount the taillight under the rear fairing which meant I needed an assembly model to make sure everything would fit together. Modeling the seat and assembly up in 3D was a life-saver. It showed me the original angle on the rear fairing was too steep and would interfere with the taillight. I flattened out the angle and adjusted the location of the taillight to get the correct fit and look. Below you can see the final design process.
With the design work completed, it was time to make sure everything would work in real life so I made a prototype. To create my prototype I printed the flattened state of the sheet metal parts and traced them on cardboard. A little cutting, bending, taping and voila, a prototype. Building a prototype is something we strongly encourage our customers to make. It’s should be part of every product development project. It made it so I could ‘place’ my design on the moped. It allowed me to see that I needed to make the seat just a little longer and a little wider. The original design just didn’t look right on the moped. Also, the slightly larger seat will be much more comfortable while cruising around on the winter-torn roads. After I updated the design it was time to start cutting and forming metal.
Step 2: Fabrication
With each flat pattern done I created an assembly with a part that was the size of the blank piece of sheet metal and then I assembled all of the flat patterns to the stock piece to make sure I had enough stock material to cut out all of the parts. Knowing that I had enough stock material I went and traced out the parts on the actual sheet metal and started cutting. I used an angle grinder to cut out my patterns because the material was a little too thick for tin snips.
With the parts cut out, I laid the flat patterns back over the cutouts and marked the bend lines so I knew where to start and stop the bends. That is another perk of using Creo’s sheet metal functionality. It shows you the start and stop locations for bends with dashed lines. See the following picture for the bend lines.
Now that everything was cut out and marked I needed something to hold the metal flange walls in order to bend them on the base. Thankfully we have a bench vise in the workshop. The only problem was that the walls on the long side were longer than the jaws on the vise. To get around this I took a couple of 2x4s and placed them in the jaws of the vise and the sheet metal between the 2x4s. The 2x4s provided two benefits, support along the entire edge of the bend as well as a nice round edge for the sheet metal to follow. Thankfully I was able to create the bends with just my hands and body weight.
For the rear fairing and the front edge, the radii of the bends were so large that I could not use the same setup used to create the bends on the base. What I did was I found a steel pipe with roughly a two-inch diameter and clamped it in the vise. I then roughly placed the middle of the bend on the center of the pipe and pressed down creating a bend/crease in the sheet metal and repeated this several times. When I had the general shape bent out in the design process I took a rubber mallet and used that to smooth out the bend. One thing to note about the rear fairing and the front edge is that I left extra material on the ends in order to have something to hold on to while bending the parts.
Once all of the sheet metal parts were cut and formed it was time to start welding them together. Welding seemed a little daunting since the only other time I welded, about 7 years ago, I set my pants on fire. Thankfully I had a coworker teach me a little about welding before I started. I also practiced quite a bit on some spare material before I started. This helped me get the welder settings correct for the material thickness. With the welder dialed in, I made tack welds to hold the parts in place while I made sure they were exactly where I wanted them. Once each piece was in its proper place I started to weld it all together. After the parts were welded together I ground down to smooth any excess weld and then went back and filled in any voids and re-ground as necessary. It was a learning experience. It was kind of like “lather, rinse, repeat” only “weld, grind, repeat.”
Below are pictures of the seat during different times of assembly as well as the finished product on the moped.
Lessons Learned:
Throughout this design process, I learned a lot. For one thing, you can do a lot more with a can-do attitude than you think. Another thing I learned was that welding is not as daunting as I thought. As with anything in life, it takes a little practice and patience. Prototypes are amazing. They may cost some time and or money but they are worth it. If I did not make a cardboard prototype in my design process I would have had a seat that was just a little too short and I would have had to remake the seat from scratch once it was finished. The sheet metal functionality in Creo Parametric is fantastic and really does work. The bend lines on the flat patterns helped immensely to create accurate parts. One other thing I learned throughout the design process was that on my next project I need to take a lot more pictures along the way.
I’ll leave you with a couple more pictures of the finished product (minus paint and a little bit of leather and foam). Until next time…
When contemplating the idea of writing a blog, I challenged myself to justify why it would be both worth my time to write, and worth yours to read. The hope is that working through self-justification will result in a blog of greater interest and value.
Sharing the motives behind this blog through self-introduction seems the right place to start. By self-introduction, I don’t mean telling you about myself — you can find all that on LinkedIn — but rather about EAC and our shared view of product development. EAC was founded and operates on a fundamental belief that the way we (you) execute product development is fundamentally flawed. We further believe that this deteriorates America’s competitive position and unnecessarily, unacceptably demotivates the expert knowledge workers who operate within the functions critical to product success.
As an achievement-focused organization, EAC seeks first to understand the drivers and root causes of the positive and negative behaviors typical of product development environments. We then engage in the competition of ideas to produce an array of countermeasures to bring to common product development problems. One output of this internal collaboration is the Product Development Operating System (PDOS), a framework for the conduct of successful product development published on the EAC website.
An element of the PDOS gets to the heart of justifying this blog. In the PDOS, we use a maturity model to articulate an important aspect of improvement efforts within product development. Limited by flawed management habits many companies become trapped at what we call Level 2 operation, “Silo’ed”. During the maturation of a product development system, the gap from Level 2 to Level 3, “Systematic”, is the most difficult to bridge. It is EAC’s mission to help product development organizations, to borrow a phrase, cross this chasm.
Siloes are interesting. In companies, they are at first a sign of progress. The generalist of entrepreneurship reforms into specialized functional areas, enabling further growth and maturation. But they eventually become a barrier to further organizational progress. That’s not surprising; Peter Senge tells us in the first law of systems thinking that “today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions”. For these maturing companies, getting beyond the silo mentality is one important key to progress.
Earlier in my career, I spent several years working in Japan at a global manufacturing company. Japan during the course of its history had periodically shut itself off from the rest of the world. The Japanese talked about their resulting global naivety — knowing and caring about only what happened within their limited domain – as ‘ii no kaeru’, a ‘frog in a well’. A well is just an upside down silo. For functional groups, understanding their own bigger picture – the landscape in which the well or silo exists – is the first step in the work of connecting the silos and fostering systematic operation.
EAC conducts Voice-of-Customer interviews, performs Product Development System Assessments, and provides consulting services. During these events, when we visit prospects and customers, it is startling to see how hungry each company’s product development thought leaders are for stimulating and informative ideas and discussions about what can be done to improve product development operation. And that is how we justify this blog. To all of you who from time to time feel like a frog, this blog is aimed at letting you know what’s going on outside of your well.
