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Adapt technology to fit your people and process

The first rule of any technology used in business is that automation applied to an efficient

operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient

operation will magnify the inefficiency.

Companies around the world are trying to find ways to accelerate product development, seeing

this as a way to improve competitive advantage. In many cases, their efforts to speed up the PD

process focus on advanced technology. But using rapid prototyping, digital simulations, product

lifecycle management, virtual engineering, and similar tool and technology to revolutionize PD

may not yield the hoped for result, primarily because technologies are seldom exclusive. Any

company can copy or purchase the tool and technology depends on the ability to customize them

in a way that makes them exclusive and integrates them uniquely to the company using them. No

one, for example, can deny that that tools and technologies have and a significant influence on

Toyota’s ability to archive development cycles of 15 months and less. But it is important to

recognize that this occurred because Toyota has had the foresight and discipline to customize

tools and technology to fit within a broader framework, one that includes people and process.

Five primary principles for choosing tools and technology

Finding one’s way though the “technojungle” in easy task. Rapidly changing functionality along

with the jungle’s many hidden hazards makes identifying and choosing the correct path difficult.

Decisions about which tools or technology to adopt and when how to integrate them into the

organization have significant implications for a company’s PD system. The

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4. Specific solution oriented: not a silver bullet. Technology can provide high-leverage if a company

has a clearly defined purpose for it. Searching for a nonexistent Holy Grail is futile. Technology is

never a substitute for the hard work that is required to make a product development system

competitive. Its potential lies in supporting and accelerating that hard work once a lean process is

in place and highly skilled people are appropriately trained and organized.

5. right size-notking sized. Many western companies have a tendency to buy the biggest, baddest,

fasted, and newest tools on market. Our old friend NAC, for instance, often boasts that it is going

to leapfrog Toyota by technological one-upmanship. This, however, seldom happens and the

following example illustrates why. For decades, Toyota has successfully used notebooks for its

engineering checklist. NAC developed an impressive online and fully integrated data base,