CASE STUDY: FAST-TRACK PRODUCT REDEVELOPMENT AT INSTRON SUBJECT: FUNDAMENTAL OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT (MAB 2204)

TEAM MEMBER: 1. S.SAMUMTRAM (MA101203) 2. S.SIVAKUMAR 3. SUFIAN BIN HUSIN (MA101414) 4. ZULKIFLI BIN ARIFFIN (MA!01413) PROFESSOR: ASSOC PROF. DR. MOHAMAD IBRAHIM MOHAMAD SUBMISSION DATE: 17 APRIL 2011 (MA091351)

1. What is the evidence to support the claim that this project was a success? The evidence to support the claim that this project was a success in Instron began when they decided to undertake change in the late 1980s, a programme to incorporate the concurrent new product development. Concurrent engineering is a work methodology based on the concurrent of tasks. It refers to product developmentin which functions of design engineering, manufacturing engineering and other functions are integrated to reduce the elapsed time required to bring a new product to the market. In 1992 at the height of the recession, Instron decided to redesign a pilot product to reduce its cost and make it easier to manufacture. Brainstorming sessions with manufacturing engineers, buyers, members of the shop floor, suppliers and additional design engineers,to findnew and innovative ways to improve the product. The outcome of these investigations was to drawcost reduced by 49 per cent; y product range rationalised from 12 to 2 versions; y unique part count reduced from 141 to 98 (fewer parts to plan, purchase, stock and handle) y total number of parts reduced from 300 to 189 (much reduced assembly effort); y assembly/machining time reduced by 55 per cent; y project completed on time, y with last version to be released in April 1994. With the adoption of concurrent engineering within Instron, it is seen as a timely evolutionary progress towards achiving better success, whatmore at the height of the recession, profit margins being squeezed and sales volume dropping. Modifications to the process of introducing new products have generally been the natural response to a changing set of market requirements, the need to redesign the instrument to reduce its cost and make it easier to manufacture.Steps are already taken to evaluate the pilot project and the pilot product within the confinement of concurrent engineering work technology. It is a method used in product development. The difference being the traditional product development approach employs simultaneous, rather than sequential, processes. By completing tasks in parallel, product development can be accomplished more efficiently cost savings. Concurrent engineering allows for design and analysis to occur at the same time, or multiple times, prior to actual deployment. This CE multidisciplinary approach emphasizes teamwork through the use of cross-functional teams, and it allows for employees to work collaboratively on all aspects of a project from start to finish. Also known as the iterative development method, it requires continual review of a teams progress and frequent revision of project plans. The rationale behind this creative, forward-looking approach is that the earlier that errors can be discovered, the easier and less costly they are to be rectified. The design management system offers several benefits, including increased product quality for the end user, faster product development times, and lower costs for both the manufacturer and the consumer.

In Inst n, its new t evel ent ess(NPD) inging new t servi e t rket nd in rder t generate and ercialise new roducts wit in its overall strategic li e cycle, and to sustain its growt in arket share, to reduce the NPD downti e any companies completed several steps at the same time referred to as concurrent engineering or time to market Many industry leaders see new product development as an ongoing process of continuous development in which the entire organi ation is always looking for opportunities. One of the evidences to show success to this project is the ability of Instron to embrace the basic concept adopted in the concurrent engineering approach that is all parts of the design, manufacture, production, management, finance, and marketing of the product are usually involved in the early stages of a product s design cycle, enabling faster product development through extensive use of simulation. ubstantial design savings accomplished through incorporating all of the design cycles and utilising a computer workstation environment. his provides access to a commonly shared database where any alteration to a product design is updated and disseminated for all members of the design and support teams.The concurrent engineering environment is a co-operative and collaborative one, as illustrated in Figure , which shows how knocking down the old walls opens up opportunities for greater input into the earlier stages of the development cycle.

VS

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1: Coll borati g knocking down the old wall Sequential Development Method vs. Iterative Development Method

Finally the environment of concurrent engineering at Instron successfully produce its product and be operational. Only few minor problems were encountered. The success was attributed by the firm to two decisions: y the selection of the right project one that made it easy to demonstrate concurrenly; y the selection of the right people those who were prepared to be open-minded and have some enthusiasm for the changes. The success story at Instron is due to the adopted concept in concurrent engineering with design activities all occurring at the same time, or concurrently: y to significantly increase productivity, y increase product uality, y reducing cycle-times, y reduce manufacturing, re-work y quality costs, y allowing errors and redesigns to be discovered early in the design process when the project is still in the concept stage. In concurrent engineering is important to get the correct data to the intended person or tool a t the right time, and in the precise format. The large variety of software integrated into the electronic design environment has allowed multi-disciplinary teams to work in their own

environment. Concurrent engineering can be considered as a systematic approach that brings product development and processes together for the entire company. Successful companies today will learn to manage the changes needed to ensure continued productivity in the global marketplace, getting the highest quality, lowest cost product to market in the least time. To manage the forces of change, a company must have a product development environment that uses concurrent engineering to produce its basic product.

Instron now views this simple project had restored the profitability of an established product through the use of innovation, ingenuity and new design techniques by the whole concurrent team. What is also clear is that the product was subject to technical change in only one area:
y y

the materials used. The other benefits have all been due to the approach that the firm's management has taken to its new product development (NPD) process.

Instron felt that the project has been a success and that this concurrent engineering method of working would become an institutionalised methodology.At the start of the article, Instron was noticeably out of date with their concurrent engineering implementation. They follow evolving paths that lead them to achieve their goals in a new product release. The term concurrent engineering is therefore seen as a suitable description for the approach to developing new products that Instron had naturally intended. The process of change has now been accepted by most, as a way of organizational life within the company. Lastly, good and reliable infrastructures complement the use of concurrent engineering and help bring them into reality.

2. Identify the steps the firm took in this project. How did this contri ute to the success? Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and their related processes, including manufacture and support. This approach is intended to cause the developers, from the outset, to consider all elements of the product life cycle from the concept through disposal, including cost, quality, schedule and user requirements.

Until early 1980s, product development was carried out in a serial mode, with manufacturing become closely involved in the process only when the engineering team had completed the design and documentation. This approach could not continue as the market become more demanding and cost conscious. In response, Instron moved to ensure that all project team were structured to include marketing and manufacturing input from their initial inception.

As a result, the first step that this firm took was to initiate a cross functional team. This is one principals of CE. A cross functional team is a group of people with different functional expertise towards a common goal. The firms team consisting of a manufacturing engineer, a design engineer, a marketing engineer and a draughtsman with a mission approach of improving the ease of manufacture of the product such that a cost reduction of 20 percent could be achieved. They often function of self directed teams responding to broad but not specific directives. They carried out a brainstorming sessions to find new and innovative ways to improve product quality, reduce cost in terms of manufacturing changes and time, and satisfied to customers requirements. Most importantly, the concurrent engineering concept approach is that all parts of design, manufacturing, production, management, finance and marketing are usually involved in the early stages of a product design cycle or in a conceptual design stage, enabling faster product development through extensive use of simulations and trials. The logic reasons are, due to it is in the conceptual design stage, the designing of the product could be brain stormed by several approaches, testing and prototyping repeatedly and regularly, until an ultimate and optimum design being produced, satisfied by the team members, without severing any cost impact and quality. This contributed to the success of the firm, when the product range rationalised from 12 to 2 versions, with the part count reduced from 141 to 98 numbers.

Secondly, the team applied communication and sharing of ideas, which was usually the natural part of their working life. This was clearly shown, when the team was co located in an area adjacent to the manufacturing facility. This also showed that everyone in the team could work together. The firm wanted the employees to accept changes in working environment. This is one of the major factors that facilitated the introduction of concurrent engineering techniques was a change in the culture that the company had been experiencing over the years. This team was set up to satisfy a particular contract, was slowly emerged as a standard way of progressing such projects. When such change is imperceptible, than there is not likely to be resistance, hence Instron followed to a smoother path of change. The term concurrent engineering is therefore simply as a suitable description for the approach to developing new products that Instron had been naturally adopting. The process of change has now been accepted by most as a way of organisational life, within the company, as new project groups were formed and others disbanded to meet contract requirement.

The firm also get a favourable support from the respective departments downstream of the design process (manufacturing, shop floor, service) and also from the front-line managers. Hence a good communication network to the respective peoples involved and a good supporting from team members and also from the respective workers, whom were open-minded to have a change with high enthusiasm, are vital in ensuring the project could proceed successfully.

Effective communication is very crucial in concurrent engineering which one or more team work together and share information in an integrated product development environment. The existing communication infrastructure should be properly support the necessary types and volume of information. Most importantly, the communication infrastructure must expedite important information to the respective right people. The greater the number of people involved in a project or team, the higher the chances of poor communication to occur, hence to many cooks will spoil the soup. The complexity of a product can determined the number of disciplines involved and both of these determine the type of infrastructure needed to share information and data.

This information determines the degree to which information or data from different disciplines can be meaningfully organized and accessed by development team members in order to create a shared understanding of the product and the process involved in developing it.

The firm realised the usage of concurrent engineering could restored the profitability of anestablished product through the use of innovation, ingenuity and new design techniques by the whole concurrent team. The other benefits have all been due to the approach that the firms management has taken to its new product development (NPD) process. The new design techniques that Instron may adopt for concurrent engineering would be the use of CAD. Hence this could easily visualise the end products by the sales and marketing at the feasibility stage and knew that they were all discussed about the same product. The sales would be realised that the powerful tool which engineering had for design also provided them with a powerful tool in sales.

The firm had selected of the right project in implementing their concurrent engineering process. The selection of project is important to ensure that the product to be produce could be adopted to the concept of concurrent engineering. The other factor that induced the success of concurrent engineering is the selection of the right people to lead this process. The individual engineer is to be given much more say in the overall design process due to collaborative nature of concurrent engineering. Giving the designer an ownership play a large role in the productivity of the employee and the quality of the product that is being produced. This stems the fact that the engineer has an ownership over their work and tend to work harder and design a more robust product, as opposed to an employee that is assigned a task with a little say in the general process.

By making this change, many organizational and managerial changes arise that must be taken into special consideration when the company move towards such a system. Issues such as the early implementation design reviews, enabling communication between engineers, software compatibility and opening the design process up to allow for concurrency creates a problem of its own. There must be a strong basis for teamwork since the overall success of the method relies on the ability of the engineers to effectively work together. Often this can be a difficult obstacle but is something that must be solved early to avoid later problems.

3. How mi ht the main adverse effects e identified and countered?

Due to highly transient and adverse changing environment in design and manufacturing process, there is some resistant was anticipated and expected to be happen in Instron.

Instron find out that there is some resistant exist among their staff in this pilot project when the firm began to undertake a change which is executed a programme to institute concurrent new product development. The main adverse has been identified among their staff who react towards the changes into concurrent engineering and senior manager staff were selected as champions to find out the cause with the objective of overcoming the resistance to change that existed. They can be grouped into 3 groups; first group is called as a passive resistance. This group of people is those who do not show reluctance to apply the new ideas even through they are attend to all groups meetings, they were nod in agreement in the meetings but at the end they still carry out the work same as before. This show a psychological impact of fear to change and unwillingness to accept the risk associated to it.

Secondly, there is staff which is do not opt with what the company do but they also reluctant to help the company in contribute concurrent project. They are called as active resistance. Thirdly, this group of people is call as undermining the initiative, whereby this people who will undermining the initiative, through overstating the apparent problems. Due to this reason there would further worries to the company such as reduced of product performance, loss of personal contacts, loss of key individuals and also higher management overhead.

Thus, Instron need to counter the above adverse effect, whereby they encounter that some staff were still uncertain about the changes in the authority of the designers and the staff also unfavourable towards the changes in the design process and some are still with notable exceptions. Furthermore, some staff also commented that they dont know how they ever worked without it when the team was co-located to a new area adjacent next to the manufacturing facility.

Besides that, more pressure was imposed on them which are selected in the initial stage of the project and these people given higher workload. They also need to compromised design

solution for sake of manufacturability. In this pilot projectthe unqualified manufacturing engineer giving major input in the design which is causing the role of engineering manager be threaten This the effect of team work, where idea can come from any per ons but the s most important is idea can be workable.

In operational process there is some problem encountered, whereby the company need to take two decisions, that is firstly, the selection of the right project. The selection of the right project is needed in order to make them easy to demonstrate the concurrency and the selection of the right people who is prepared to be open minded and have some enthusiasm for the changes.

To overcome the counter effect, Instron did brainstorming session with the manufacturing engineers, buyers, members of the shop floor, suppliers and additional design engineers, to find a new and innovative ways to improve the product. hen the idea for new products has

obtained from the basic product research analysis, they will do idea screening in order to eliminate the unnecessary concepts and design when designing the product. Once the screening done, they will move forward to the concept development and testing. t this stage, they will develop the marketing and engineering detail to make sure that their product is marketable and value for money. hen executing the new product manufacturing or design,

Instron allow errors to be happen earlier in the design processwhen the project isstill in feasibility study. By doing this Instron can save their production time and cost.

Figure : Conceptual model to support C Cross Functional team in C Implementation ( adad, 6)

Likewise, Instron has come up with a strategic to organise a cross group communication between the design team and production team where the project team was co-located in an area adjacent to the manufacturing facility purposely for easy communication and sharing ideas between them as shown in the above table figure 1. Moreover, a small multi functional team was formed which is consists of manufacturing engineer, a designer engineer, a marketing engineer and a draughtsman. This team was showing some co-operation acting between them which is essential in order to get best results. In fact, it is considered good practise to have one or more production planner stationed for adoptability of production and feasibility of manufacture. Instron also decentralise team in order for them to take decision rather than reverting to top management. They also provide training and enough manpower resources in their company for the staff to adopt the changing working environment with new people.

Collaborationproblem solving within the functional departments also help them discuss more detail and any dispute in decision making can be sorted out fast. Apart of this, application of new technology such as building design software, CAD design and computer networking also encountered the adverse effect caused by the rapid changes in production and design of the product. This will help them to come up with robust redesign of the product and telecommunication between the each department even faster.

By the encounter this adverse effect, Instron claim that this pilot project was a successful project to them and this concurrent engineering will be implemented in their other projects.

4. The firm attri uted the success to the choice of project and the people selected to carry it out. If a similar way of workin is to e more widely adopted, what mi ht usefully e done to ensure that other projects are similarly successful? Normally to introduce concurrent engineering in a project, firms will start with a pilot project first, which project team will be defined as small team. This is to test if the company is in the right direction towards a sensible plan in implementing a concurrent engineering environment to the future projects. This is what done at Instron, by having one person from each department to work in a concurrent process as team of producing a product. This will be a different picture when firms decide to initiate the transition for concurrent engineering in bigger scale or other new products. Firms need to determine few factors before it can decide to implement concurrent engineering to many other products. Firstly, firms need to look at its current product development environment. This is need to identified a systematic approach that will shape a product development process. There are five fundamental forces to be considered before the firm is to determine if concurrent engineering is going to help those products. These forces are technologies, tasks, tools, time, and talent.
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Technologies Firms need to identify if the current technologies is enough to develop a new systems. Firms need to make sure that the technologies used will make the product marketable and built will the industry standards. It no point have a fast process with advance technologies if products manufactured does not meet these standards

Tasks Firms need to make sure how there are going to brake task to smaller group, defined it and manage it effectively especially when the task increase in complexity. The firms need make sure that the task process would continue improved its efficiency from a standard process.

Tools Firms need to identified the current tools is sufficient enough to change the environment, is there need new tools to support the process to achieve new environment.

Time How is the company is going shorten the time for a project by including concurrent engineering. Firms need to determine the metrics for improving the project or products in a development cycle time.

Talent Firms need to make sure that they got talented employees to work effectively and with a great concern, ensuring there is a long term supply of talent. Managers need to play a big role by keeping employees satisfied and empower them by working with the project vision.

Secondly,firms need to make sure having a vision for implementing concurrent engineering environments that would help a companys product or project to grow. Vision is important so for every team member to work on right track. Every time managers need determine new vision for a project and constantly emphasize on the vision while project is implemented. This is to make sure that team members aim in achieving success does not elongated to other direction. Normally correct visions bring success to a projects. Firms need to make sure that by demonstrating concurrent engineering, firm can bring the 4 dimensions into equilibrium. This 4 dimension are organization, communication infrastructure, requirements, and product development. The shape of these dimension will continues balance and shift depending on type of project and the current market forces. The 4 dimension is explained as follow:
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Or anization: In an organization, there will be managers and team member who will be working on one project. Managers must create, empower and support the project with the team members with different disciplines based on the size of the project. This team must assume authority and responsibility for their design decisions, and must commit and agree themselves to consider other team members decisions.

Communication Infrastructure : A firm to emphasize on concurrent engineering environments need to have good communication with linking people, ideas,

specifications, processes and feedback relating to communication infrastructure . Information come from every dimension, the teams members need to make sure that information is translate well to the action related that need to take.
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Requirements: This dimension is the most important, because in general project management is satisfying customer requirement. This is ideal either for conventional system or a concurrent engineering that need to focuses on customer requirements and most requirements are viewed, as this factor that influence customer acceptance. Firms need to determine their customers that they want to focus, make sure that they are meeting the requirement and the project meets industry standards too. The two

vital standards that the firms need to exercise are planning strategies and the planning Standpoints. This will also be a standards help drive and energise the other dimensions.

Product Development: For the product in a project that firms want to use in a concurrent concept, the firms need make sure its products has a stable outline with integrated vision of the project or product developed earlier. This can be from design conception to manufacturing and support consent. This method develops allot of reference to other project in the future review for continually improve

The fourth points, that need to be done is taking care risk. The firm need to make sure psychologically impact of it employee that are willing to accept risk associated to it, and fear to change. This is where employee need to works as teamwork concept with different occupational line and practice concurrent engineering environment. Thefirm that want to success in CE need also do to ensure larger project to be success.In order to make success, there should not be any seniority among team member. This because certain managers are asks to work on a project in a concurrent environment; they will behave more seniority among otherteam members during giving decisions. These managers will be in fear of losing power they tend to control and domination over project important decision such on the design and planning phase. Firms need to make sure managers are evenly distributed in different teamto avoid disputes in decisions making and working together, as this can soar the entire project in concurrent environment. Firms that wants to introduce concurrent engineering in large scale projects need to involved many team members or big function groups for a different product in one large scale project. Company need to make sure more training or exposed needed especially on conceptual and practical knowledge in concurrent engineering. When a project involved with many members, company needs to give time to different individual in term to see results either from of the person or the project. As different person have different capacity and style in adopting CE in a new programs introduced. Normally knowledge need to be constantly improved by going for more training and practice, company need to prepared budget for this. Financial is an important factors for firm that wants to success in concurrent environment. As implementing concurrent engineering many projects, company need to good budget,

especially for their communication equipment and software. In concurrent engineering, communication is the main function in communicated and to make a project to finish faster especially using electronic communication such as email, 3G or GPRS in communicating between members. Hence with these points, we ensure that firm can improve in implementing concurrent engineering for many project including large scale of PPI.