Success is Assured: Satisfy Your Customers On Time and On Budget by Optimizing Decisions Collaboratively Using Reusable Visual Models

"Success is Assured" was born from a pair using those design practices over a century ago: The Wright Brothers. They set about methodically learning the causal relationships between the different design decisions they needed to make and the performance of the airplane. The Wright Brothers fundamentally transformed the front end of development into a sharply focused learning and decision-making process, and thereby eliminated the late - process rework in which their competition was stuck.

Similarly, Toyota built an amazing manual product development system that consistently created a cadence of high quality products that customers want. Myriads of Lean principles, jargon, and tools have been introduced and applied with minimal impact on design loopbacks, engineering productivity, and knowledge reuse within small to midsize engineering companies – and almost no penetration within highly complex engineering companies. This book teaches methodologies to relentlessly expose knowledge gaps and trade-offs early and optimize results before detailed design begins, thereby avoiding the expensive firefighting and engineering rework that consume most of our engineering capacity today. This book teaches new thinking and methodologies to convert the chaotic front end of product development into a convergent process of set-based learning and continuous innovation – a game changer for companies that depend upon a steady flow of innovative products.

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About the Author

Penny W. Cloft

Penny worked at Pratt & Whitney for 35 years. She spent most of that time in Engineering as a design and systems engineer. In the early 90’s she was part of the on site engineering team at P&W’s North Haven airfoil facility supporting the lean transformation to just in time manufacturing. This transformation is described as the "Acid Test" for large companies with complex products in Jim Womack’s book Lean Thinking. That experience had a profound affect on Penny and led her to seek positions where she could apply her new lean learning.

Penny successfully led several groups in both Operations and Engineering to reduce their process lead times and improve quality output and customer satisfaction. She joined the Systems Engineering Group in 2005 and became involved in an effort to improve the commercial jet engine product development process. Michael Kennedy’s books influenced Penny’s process improvement approach. Her team of engineering and operations experts transformed P&W’s development process from a strict phase gate process to a modified phase gate process with disciplined integrating events that provide focus on knowledge gaps early in the development process.

She founded PK Lean Consultants LLC so she could work with other design and manufacturing companies to lean out their technical and business process and become best in class.

Michael N. Kennedy

Michael had a 30 year career at Texas Instruments Inc., where he was the lead engineer on many development projects including missile system products and manufacturing systems. During his last years at TI, he was a leader in reengineering the core engineering and manufacturing processes, including adopting concurrent engineering, solid modeling CAD systems, CAD/CAM integration, and driving TI's quality initiatives, leading to TI's winning of the Malcolm Baldrige Award.

For the past 10 years, Michael has researched and applied the principles of Toyota’s outstanding product development system to dramatically improve companies’ productivity metrics. His first book, Product Development for the Lean Enterprise, explained the Toyota underlying philosophy for developing products. His second book, Ready, Set, Dominate, extends the learning into implementation strategies and discusses two case studies in mapping these methodologies to western companies. He is the co-founder and CEO of Targeted Convergence Corporation with the mission of developing models, training, and tools for implementing those principles into manufacturing companies.

Brian M. Kennedy

Brian is an INCOSE Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP) who has spent more than 25 years designing complex software systems. He was Chief Architect of i2 Technologies’ Supply Chain Planner and Demand Fulfillment applications, applying Toyota lean manufacturing, Theory of Constraints, and advanced optimization to the planning and scheduling of the larger supply chain, helping to establish a new market space (Supply Chain Management) and generating billions of dollars of value for i2’s customers. Brian was named the first i2 Fellow and holds a dozen patents on the inventions that were the basis for those software systems. As co-founder and CTO of Targeted Convergence Corporation, Brian is responsible for the systems engineering of TCC’s Success Assured® software and the associated training that is built upon the concepts and methodologies revealed in this book.