Visualising, Analysing, and Managing the Design Factory

In this paper, we present a framework to define, visualise, analyse and manage a design factory in a complex engineering environment. Design engineering is the core of product development and provides high leverage in cost, quality and time to market. Lean principles can be applied to gain these improvements to the design management system. However, unlike manufacturing and operations, design processes are inherently non-linear and iterative in nature. In addition, design outputs, queues and work in progress are not visible and tangible. This creates challenges in applying lean principles in the design environment. To alleviate these issues design engineering is treated as a factory and its key steps are mapped by using the gated review process. The inputs and outputs of the design factory system are identified and employed to create an effective productivity improvement dashboard. The gated review process steps are used to understand the flow of design solutions. Lean principles and structured root-cause analysis is used to create a system to visualise, analyse and manage the design factory.