What High Tech Can Learn from the Military and Aerospace Industries

Whether you’re the director of operations at a SMB or the vice president of engineering at a global enterprise, achieving operation excellence is your number one responsibility; however, a flatter manufacturing world — with globally dispersed supply chain teams — has made overseeing product development processes more challenging.

The number and frequency of product development changes and complications of big data sharing among globally dispersed partners had made managing operations difficult.

Manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to improve the efficiency of new product development (NPD). Getting to market faster, easier, smarter, and more affordably are keys to success, especially in a competitive market where opportunities appear, and disappear, at the drop of a hat. Your projects have a scheduling problem if:

1. You have tried creating a single source of truth but people prefer their own “back pocket” schedules.

2. You have frequent meetings to resolve schedule/resource conflicts.

3. Everyone is constantly firefighting and waiting on someone else/

4. People are perpetually overloaded.

5. High priority projects get done in half the time - which only means that, with correct scheduling, all projects can get done much faster.

And don’t get me even started with the mismanagement of valuable engineering resources that are often wasted on less important tasks. Bottomline is this: If you have a scheduling issue, improving processes or soft skills won't improve project delivery or resource efficiencies — only fixing the scheduling problem will.

Case in point, when it came to the new product development of Boeing’s T45 flight simulator device, the company wanted to reduce Design Development Phase cycle time from 10 months to 8 months within scope and budget, and complete projects with higher first-time quality in the Hardware/Software Integration phase

To achieve these goals, the client created a core team, introducing it to the concepts of ow-based planning and turned to Realization. Over the course of a 14-month period the Boeing T45 group realized dramatic improvements across several domains:

Design and development phase was completed 45 days ahead of schedule. And hardware-software integration phase completed 32 days ahead of schedule When it came to quality, the preliminary design review completed without a single request for action, which was an unprecedented first-time quality for a complex training device. Additionally, Boeing experienced an approximately 20% savings in the design and development phase with 25% cost reduction in the hardware/software integration phase and restored customer confidence resulting in new business.

More and more companies are turning to real-time scheduling to accelerate new product development.