Case Study: Improving the Development Process

 

Who: The client designs equipment for the semiconductor industry.

Situation: The company provides complex, technically demanding systems that include hardware and software. The design team for the next generation product was experiencing high levels of bugs on first article prototypes. This caused expensive rework and delayed new product availability. Reducing the number of design escapes was imperative in order to meet R&D budget constraints and strict time to market requirements.

Results

Solution: The client identified the portion of the design process that needed immediate priority focus. Synergy conducted extensive interviews with key team members and internal customers to identify contributing factors, then drew on internal expertise and published research to pinpoint relevant industry best practices. Armed with the information from the interviews and research, Synergy designed custom training using the case method. The design team used this interactive training to analyze how real companies handled similar problems in real situations. Synergy immediately followed the training with a facilitated process improvement session. The design team learned how to analyze its existing process and design a new one. The team identified improvements that customized the best practices to their unique situation.

Result: The design team improved their design capabilities, matching their culture and unique needs. Buy-in was strong because they designed the improvements themselves, rather than im-porting someone else’s approach. The team also learned an effective method for making improvements that they can apply in the future.

 

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Consulting and Training

Project Management Program Management  Portfolio Management   Product Development

(c) 2005 Synergy Professional Services