Implementing Lean Principles to Dramatically Cut Time to Market
Elekta Limited is a UK-based company that develops radiotherapy equipment incorporating hardware, software and embedded software. A typical project will take four years from inception to market introduction. The industry is heavily regulated, requiring us to certify our products which in turn places constraints on our development processes.
The company have set a target of halving time to market for our new product releases to two years using Lean techniques. We are redefining processes and techniques for the entire product development lifecycle in order to achieve this, from Business Needs through to Design, Make & Test. Each area of the lifecycle has been addressed within a week-long event.
The Lean principle focuses on the entire project team working together in co-located cells, that results in faster time to market by achieving consensus much earlier, and reducing the number of superfluous hand-offs between project members involved in generating requirements, plans, etc.
Our first Lean event was held in April 2007, to define a new process for developing our system requirements. This has been followed by further events to define other processes, and ensure we have a coherent development lifecycle. We are now flowing the first few projects through this new process.
This talk will elaborate the principles of Lean and the proposed modifications we are making to our processes in order to achieve these dramatic results. We will share some of the benefits of the changes, focussing on methods to achieve these revolutionary improvements. We will describe some of the major problems encountered both with the processes and the people, along with practical solutions.
Speakers
Barbara Vickers , Requirements Manager, Elekta
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