NOVEMBER 2022AUTOTECHOUTLOOK.COM9extensive adoption of a Building Block Approach for composite manufacture, the McLaren Artura was able to achieve 97% Right First Time in crash tests.At this point in time, the system is ready to Flow and must work without interruption. This process could also identify further inefficiencies and might require reconsidering the Value Stream. The Pull phase is the next step in the route toward lean development. Once a product­let us assume an all-new model­is readied to go to market, Product Development and Marketing must be reassured that customer needs are met. There may be cases where customer needs or expectations have evolved, and the product is not fully meeting them. That is the moment where Product Development and Marketing must apply the "pull" logic. This means keeping up-to-date with technology shifts, demographic trends, or global economic changes. Continuous product improvement at McLaren is allowing us to tackle the evolution of customer needs, including in the areas of infotainment, ADAS, and on-board systems, as well as vehicle performance, light-weighting, and perceived quality. Effective innovation also requires an understanding of true customer profiles to shape a solid product proposition and, at the same time, balance costs. Global economic changes see automotive customer expectations evolve rapidly, quicker than in any previous era. A Lean company such as McLaren maintains a constant focus on understanding how the market evolves, translating customer needs into state-of-the-art products, through the correct timing of the entire value creation process. Perfection Lean principle is the final stage. Luxury companies like McLaren should never stop improving Lean principles in relation to value, flow, pull and waste elimination. The `Lessons Learned' process has helped us in eliminating waste and redundancies in the development process, implementing standards such as Kamishibai and the Kaizen philosophy (improvement by everyone, everywhere, every time).Lean product development also includes a simultaneous engineering team, as well as quick learning cycles, chief engineers, and project houses. Visual methods such as Kanban can help activity assignments and avoid overload by allowing project managers to quickly reference exactly the status of each step in the process. It also reduces the need to verbally translate and explain the status of project tasks by conveying insight that is based on easily recognizable visual cues such as card positioning, color, symbology, and more.As a final consideration, it is worth reiterating that planning complex development projects remain a difficult process. There is a natural reluctance to apply Lean principles to product development, especially when this implies cultural change. However, Lean is proven as a powerful system for developing new products, as well as the processes needed to produce and deliver them. Effective in companies large and small across diverse industries, it is more than merely a strategy for product development, rather it enables leveraging companies to build a sustainable system for consistently creating profitable value streams that, from the start, eliminate upstream issues. Product marketing, product development, and finance work together to define the specific value of the product and the market positioning; this is the first step in Lean principle application
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