• Design Strategy for Profitable Growth
• Learning Customers' "love-to-have" requirements
• Understanding difference between acceptable and excellent designs
• Aiming for robust designs
• Process for building excellence in designs
• Innovation in designs for growth
• What to innovate
• Portfolio of innovative designs
• Process for innovative thinking
• Launching designs for profitable growth

Abstract:

Smart designs are released for production after fanfare in the design engineering for its completion. Ecstasy of smart designs often turns into nightmares for the manufacturing department. The manufacturing battle begins by tweaking the process, meetings with design engineering, being berated for poor capability, and turning inspectors into ghosts. Eventually the product is introduced late in the market with high defect rate, no profit, and stress of keeping up with the customer demand for more products with poor yield, and higher returns. This has been seen product after product from company to company where many new products are introduced with a lot of excitement and planning, and thump into manufacturing.

Experience has shown that most manufacturing problems can be traced to design related issues, thus making excellence in design a high priority. We must focus on achieving excellence by recognizing impact of design on overall corporate performance, listening to customers for their preferences, understanding excellence in design, and maximizing innovation in our designs to gain competitive advantage. 

Praveen’s presentation includes simple and powerful concepts and tools necessary to achieve excellence in design and better manufacturability for customer loyalty. Excellent designs should lead to revenue growth, higher profit margin due to the minimum waste in production.

About the speaker:

Praveen Gupta, president of Accelper Consulting (www.accelper.com), consults with companies looking for sustained profitable growth. He has deployed methodologies for rapid improvement in top and bottom line through measurements, excellence, and innovation.

Praveen has worked for Motorola and AT&T Bell Laboratories, and consulted with several organizations. He has written for several magazines. His best selling books include Business Innovation in the 21st Century, Six Sigma Business Scorecard, The Six Sigma Performance Handbook, and Service Scorecard. Praveen’s work has been translated in multiple languages.

Praveen teaches Business Innovation at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, and Operations Management at DePaul University.