Assess a real-life company or organization’s use of Lean, Agile, DFSS, or Design Thinking. Provide evidence of their processes and outcomes. Comment on where the organization may find new opportunities to use a methodology covered in this course. (LO1, LO2, LO3, LO4).
Minimum 8 pages, maximum 10 pages (double spaced), not including cover page. Please look at the example paper for your references.
STUDENT X
Applied
Trine University – GE 5093 – Design Thinking – Term Paper
July 25th, 202
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Abstract
This paper includes explanations of design thinking concepts from Trine Universities Design
Thinking course along with brief observations of implementation in a real-world, global company with
recommendations for improvement. The aerospace market is an oligopoly made up of large, global
companies. The competition is thick, driving organizations to seek out what works best to deliver the most
value while incurring the least amount of cost. With the goal of driving customer-derived value into the
core of everything a company practices, design thinking is the latest strategy to implement. This is evident
by the different flavors of design thinking adopted by big names in the tech industry—IBM, Salesforce,
Spotify, Toyota, Microsoft, and Samsung to name a few. They all have their own implementation to
complement their values and structure—one company’s model probably wouldn’t work out well at another
company. This paper will review some of the strategies associated with design thinking and evaluate how
Rolls-Royce’s supply chain organization has supported those strategies and what improvements can be
made to take it further.
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Introduction
Throughout my career I have only ever worked at large corporations. There is always an attempt
to implement the latest innovative strategy to drive business success. Usually, the programs are kicked off
with hype to boot, but they lose momentum over time. Design thinking would seem like the next sort of
round to come out. Working in Rolls-Royce’s Supplier Management organization the last 6 years seems
primed for a new approach to doing business. In 2015, they deployed what they call the Rolls-Royce
Production System (RRPS) which is a solid framework to start from. They have elements of design
thinking built into it, but the execution and practices have fizzled out. Design thinking, Lean, Agile, and
DFSS are concepts that could really revitalize RRPS if implemented properly
Design Thinking
At the start of the course, I described design thinking as an overall strategy in how to
realize an objective in a methodical way, up front, such that it minimizes risk and waste, maximizes
success, and can be refined over time as it almost feeds back in to itself in the end. I mistakenly went on
to describe it as a fractal pattern. Dam and Siang describe it as “an iterative process in which we seek to
understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative
strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding”
(2020). So, while the approach itself could be described as a standard pattern, the execution certainly
should not be. The standardized portion of the approach consists of some main concepts. IBM’s flavor
consists of 4 concepts: Understand, Explore, Prototype, and Evaluate (IBM, 2014). IBM do a great job at
leveraging Agile along with design thinking to increase project success. While design thinking is much
like the old approach of “thinking outside the box”, there is a social aspect that is new, which Agile seems
to really drive home when it’s used in parallel as IBM does.
RR supply chain from a high-level perspective is very much rigid. Generally, the same
approach is always used on projects, typically production development. The program feeds the
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/challenge-assumptions
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requirements, the SMT gets going and its rinse and repeat. The program is always considered the
customer, and the needs are always the same—a rate of conforming parts delivered by a certain time. In
reality, depending on the supply chain design, an SMT could be delivering components to another SMT’s
suppliers who processes the parts further, who then sends to another SMT’s supplier who does assembly
and testing, with a RR facility at the end for higher-level module integration. So, really, there are many
customers that could be accounted for. RR could leverage design thinking by redefining the “customer” is
in these supply chain development projects and avoid a lot of problems caused by fragment and isolated
management methods. There are often production lines that get technical approval from engineers who
don’t actually know how the products are handled downstream or where they end up in the final
assembly. The program can not be the simple answer to who the “customer” is anymore if RR expects to
maintain a competitive share of the market.
Lean
Lean in the context of business strategy is all about identifying and reducing wastes. This
isn’t waste the waste that gets placed into dumpsters—in this context, waste is any unnecessary work that
is of no value to the customer and the business. “The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the
customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste” (www.lean.org). AQS has
established a catchy acronym to remember the 8 types of waste to help identify them to then take action:
DOWNTIME. This stands for Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-utilized talent, Transportation,
Inventory, Motion, and Extra-processing. Changes made to reduce these types of wastes reduces costs,
increases efficiencies, and improves responsiveness. The main takeaway is that it will increase profit
margins everything else remaining the same. ASQ makes a great point that will be relevant later, “The
leanest factory cannot achieve its full potential if it has to work with non-lean suppliers and
subcontractors” (asq.org).
In 2015, RR launched an effort to implement their Rolls-Royce Production System
(RRPS). On the supply chain side of the business, supplier management teams (SMT) assigned a team
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member as champion to each of the 14 main concepts. Each concept requires minimum standards to be
met in order for the SMT’s RRPS framework to get the “green flag”. Concept 6.1 of RRPS is “Waste
Reduction” with the goal stated as, “The team are trained in waste reduction and are actively reducing
waste in their area”. The two minimum standards are, “The team can identify waste reduction
opportunities using TIMPWOOD” (an older version of DOWNTIME) and “There is a formal way for
team members to raise and close waste issues”. While the goal is to actively reduce wastes, completion of
the minimum standards doesn’t quite satisfy the stated goal. That must have been deemed sufficient for
the green flag though with the expectation that there is momentum and changes would eventually get
worked.
In order to review the progress that’s been made, I searched through the local network where each
SMT houses their respective RRPS files. All of the waste reduction sheets had similar data collected
making it relatively easy to compile. Of the 45 wastes identified, only 25 are within the SMT’s ability to
change, so the other 20 should really be assigned to the central team to work. As shown in Figure 1,
Defects are at the top, followed by Waiting and Motion. Looking at the detail provided by some of the
teams, the integrity of how these were designated is questionable. That might not be worth digging into as
there are some other major problems with this attempt to work Lean into the working culture.
Figure 1 – Count of Waste Issues by Type
While the teams did pretty well in getting a list of identified wastes, it is clear that the effort went
stagnant very quickly. Only 3 out of 45 were marked complete. Also, the most recently modified file was
updated in 2017. This could be due to a lack of clarity on what kinds of wastes to identify and/or how
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they were expected to make the appropriate changes. Internal processes with waste issues can’t be
changed by the SMT’s themselves. Global process owners would need to be the ones to agree with the
waste and make the change accordingly. The SMT really should focus on wastes related to the external
supply chain. There are central, dedicated teams that only focus on improving internal processes and
tools. It would make sense to influence the central team to adopt a design thinking approach, and utilize
Lean as a collaborative effort with the supply chain folks who are subject to what they come up with—
they are clearly a customer in that light. They could leverage Agile to work the solutions with the SMT’s
as their customers. Reflecting on the earlier ASQ comment—if the central team is not thinking Lean
relative to the tools and processes, they deploy, the output generated by the folks using them are certainly
not going to be without waste either. As many advocates for the right-to-repair would agree—it’s very
frustrating to be stuck with something that doesn’t work well and even more so when you don’t have the
ability to fix it yourself.
Agile
Denning details the idea of an Agile organization well when he describes it as “a growing,
learning, adapting living organism that is in constant flux to exploit new opportunities and add new value
for customers” ((Denning, 2021). In order for an organization to be Agile, though, it must be deployed
and practiced at a lower level, specifically as a strategy for product and process development. This
specific application originated out of frustration in the software development world. Thought leaders
sharing in the same misery gathered together and produced a manifesto to commit to how they would
conduct themselves within their competing companies in order to influence the industry as a whole. going
forward even as competitors. The highlighted principles from the manifesto are as follows:
– Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
– Working software over comprehensive documentation
– Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
– Responding to change over following a plan
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They clarified how to interpret these by adding, “…while there is value in the items on the right,
we value the items on the left more” (AgileManifesto.org).
There are 12 principles altogether, but we’ll focus on just those 4 main ones. It’s important to
point out that while the items on the left of the statements is the goal, the items on the right still need
some attention. This is like common mantra businesses use, “Safety First, Quality Always”. One is not
prioritized over the other—they’re both critical and accounted for in parallel. The expectation from the
manifesto is to not forget about the items on the left and keep the status quo from shifting to focus on the
right side. For large corporations, the status quo would certainly shift over time without regular manual
intervention. Using my 6.5 years of experience at RR, following is an evaluation for each of the 4 main
principles within supply chain management.
Shifting from processes and tools to individual and interactions has never been more relevant
given the effects of the COVID pandemic. Prior to COVID, RR supply chain employees sat in
“neighborhoods” within the two downtown office buildings. It was normal to interact face-to-face. Once
the pandemic hit, all supply chain management employees were forced to work from home and are
expected to continue indefinitely. Issues that would have normally been resolved with a 10-minue face-to-
face conversation now take about a week or more. Rolls-Royce has not emphasized the important of the
hierarchy of communication forms and make it clear the expectations of being responsive. With the
additional capability of flexing working hours, many people screening call, fail to respond to Microsoft
Teams messages, and correspondence is reduced to email traffic. Rolls-Royce needs to recognize how far
we are from having robust communication and interaction and reset the expectations especially given the
new remote working environment.
The next principle to evaluate is working milestones over comprehensive documentation. The
principle was modified from “software” to “milestones” to better suit RR supply chain. The milestones
most often worked in supply chain are related to production development. We utilize PPAP (Production
Product Approval Process) which breaks down production development into 21 elements with a handful
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of milestones along the way. Rolls-Royce uses a web-based portal called MyPPAP to track the progress
and provide a central reporting tool. A major problem with the tool is that it’s not clear what fields drive
the reports. So, when someone finds something is misaligned, it’s difficult to determine which field needs
updated. There are weekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings to review program progression so the reports
are constantly being generated for one reason or another. When a report needs fixed there are usually
multiple levels of people working to get them corrected in time. Sometimes they end up manually
modifying the reports outside MyPPAP causing downstream reports to be even more misaligned and
difficult to correct. While the tool itself needs to be improved, this is a perfect example of too much time
and effort being spent on documentation and reporting rather than the milestones themselves. The fact
that the tool exists means someone is thinking about it. The team developing the tool could leverage Agile
and take a design thinking approach to get a tool in place that successfully saves everyone from spending
so much time on reporting. This perspective could be used across all centrally developed tools.
RR supply chain deals more with suppliers than customers, so swap “customer” with “supplier”
to make it, “Supplier collaboration over contract negotiation”. Cost reduction projects are one of the
main activities worked between RR manufacturing engineers and their supplier counterparts. Most
contracts mandate that cost reduction projects get split 50/50 between RR and the supplier. This is the
main element substantiating the justification for the project to be worked on both sides. It wouldn’t be
great for business to use RR resources to realize cost reductions that only increase the profit margins of
our suppliers with no benefit to RR. The problem often faced is that we’re told to hold off on these kinds
of projects because they complicate contract negotiations. Contract negotiations can last around a year,
which makes holding back on cost reduction efforts unreasonable from a business perspective. There is a
bit of a running joke that we can’t ever utilize the contracts, because they’re always being renegotiated.
While the technically-oriented roles seem to be collaborating, the commercial counterparts seem to be
clashing. Recognizing that we’re all pushing for the same goals, RR supply chain needs to extend the idea
of supplier collaboration across all roles otherwise it holds everyone else back.
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The last main principle, responding to change over following a plan, has great potential for
improvement within the RR supply chain. The design release process is overly rigid given the complexity
of the development required for manufacturing. Design engineers naturally prioritize the form, fit, and
function leaving manufacturability as a quick evaluation on paper. Some components are feet in diameter
with hundreds of features. It’s impossible to really know for sure how manufacturable the component
will be until one is actually processed. With extremely long lead times, not only is design now willing to
leave a design unreleased for that long, but they’ll likely not be willing to be constantly incorporating
changes to accommodate. Unfortunately, that means the changes are done later when they cost more and
cause major disruption to the program. The design release process needs to be more open to Agile—
welcome change and work dynamically with manufacturing to work towards the final solution. Getting
prototyping underway early could allow for changes to be incorporated in parallel to the processing of the
first components. This would require input to be fed into design along the way, but it is possible given
modern technologies like 3D scanning.
Design for Six Sigma
The topic of Six Sigma throughout my career has been confusing. I’ve lived through the
progression detailed by Vikram Bhargava showing it transition from a literal definition to a philosophical
one used to drive management systems. As a metric, sigma isn’t really used that much–Cp and Cpk are
all I’ve used in practice in my career on the manufacturing side. I see the design side use sigma more
often, so it’s likely used more for theory rather than practice. The reason its progression has been
confusing is because I was formally taught the metric, but then observed the progression without
explanation over the las 15 years. So, what does it mean now? Vikram describes it as a “structured
application of tools and techniques applied on a project basis to achieve sustained strategic results”
(Bhargava, 2015). I would describe it further as being a data-driven approach to everything. It seems the
use of “Six Sigma” in management system names is really to signify that everything is quantified, things
are measured, and so decisions are straight forward, and success is able to be objectively substantiated. A
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common place where this is used is with project selection. Creveling, Slutsky, and Antis Jr. recommend
the Pugh evaluation process to evaluate and select concepts that “score the highest in feasibility in
satisfying the voice of the customer…and the corresponding technology requirements” (2002, p. 399).
RR supply chain doesn’t utilize data-driven decisions to down-select or prioritize projects. This
could be in part due to the organizational structure. Each SMT is assigned a large team of cross-functional
people of 4 different types: a buyer, an order controller (aka planner), a quality engineer, and a
manufacturing engineer. They each have their own silo of responsibility that the other roles can’t do
themselves, but each requires input from the other which is where the collaboration is required. In the last
year though, buyers and quality engineers have transitioned to a new structure where they aren’t tied to
SMT’s and instead are deployed from a central team. With that move, those teams could adopt a DFSS
approach to how they deploy their resources to support the SMT’s using the same down-selection and
prioritization approach. For buyers, it could be driven by estimated costs. Quality could be also be driven
by a cost estimates driven by quality issues impacting delivery and program disruption. Every role could
deploy something like this even if they’re not formally centralized. It just requires management to push
this sort of collaboration.
Findings and Recommendations
Rolls-Royce has a framework in place that includes elements of design thinking. There was a
clear and enthusiastic effort to drive teams to develop their own system as part of the Rolls-Royce
Production System launch in 2015. The minimum standards helped get everyone educated on the topics, a
set of tools to use, and a system to govern it. As soon as it was all established, they waved the green flag,
and it was supposed to be off to the races. Unfortunately, it seems that most of the teams ran out of gas
before turn 1. It’s not entirely their fault though—it was unreasonable to expect the SMT’s to have the
privilege of making changes to the processes that housed the wasteful practices. Rolls-Royce needs to
redefine who the customer is in these scenarios or they need to clarify within the minimum standards
what the SMT should be focusing on. Most of the waste reduction issues were relative to internal
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processes that the SMT has no control over. Instead, they should have been trained to identify wastes in
the supply chain itself—at the external suppliers. Improvements made there will reduce costs and drive
towards a more agile supply chain. The wastes inherent to the internal processes should be worked by the
global process owners who need to consider the SMT the customer. There is a good opportunity for
leveraging the Agile approach working those solutions. Ultimately, RRPS could be revitalized if some
details were ironed out on just how these concepts should be practiced. With the movement of employees
from cross-functional teams to centrally managed teams, they have a great opportunity to leverage DFSS
to down-select projects across their discipline and prioritize their efforts. Even the roles still organized
could leverage this approach if they’re able to collaborate across SMTs and pull themselves up out of
their silos. With a clear understanding of the design thinking concepts and knowledge of how they can be
properly applied and practiced, Rolls-Royce could take their pre-existing framework and update it to
realize the benefits originally intended along with making modern strides. One of the newer facets of
design thinking that I’ve recognized is the focus on social interaction through all of the activities. This is
highlighted in IBM’s model, complimented by their use of Agile, and is reflected in the Agile Principles.
This is especially important with a majority of RR supply chain working remotely without the ability to
Conclusion
On some frequent basis, the large corporations I’ve worked for push large-scale implementations
of programs using the latest and greatest approaches with catchy buzzwords. If they practiced what they
preached and utilized some of the elements for the implementation itself, systems like RRPS might take
hold and the company could actually realize the benefits. Using time and resources to educate, develop,
and deploy systems that then go unused is massively wasteful in and of themselves. The green flag waved
in 2015 with the launch of RRPS which put in place a decent framework to build upon. The SMT’s have
broken down before turn 1 and need to come into the pits. They don’t need topped off or new tires, they
need a new power unit and a new team principal. Design thinking is the person for the job. I lead two
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teams between two different SMTs and plan on walking management through these findings. I’ll be
aiming to encourage design thinking elements to be incorporated into our RRPS frameworks. From there
other SMT’s can follow suit. More precise direction seems appropriate as well through the redeployment.
I would surely make one of the goals getting people passionate about their jobs and excited to do great.
That’s easier said than done, but I’m excited to try!
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References
Dam, R., & Siang, T. (2020). What is design thinking and Why is it so popular? Retrieved July
25, 2021, from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/what-is-design-
thinking-and-why-is-it-so-popular
IBM, T. (Producer). (2014, November 21). How It Works: Design Thinking [Video file].
Retrieved July 25, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXtN4y3O35M
www.Lean.org. (n.d.). What is lean? Retrieved July 23, 2021, from
https://www.lean.org/WhatsLean/
Asq.org. (n.d.). What is lean? Retrieved July 25, 2021, from https://asq.org/quality-resources/lean
Denning, S. (2021, June 28). What is agile? Retrieved July 25, 2021, from
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2016/08/13/what-is-agile/?sh=2a1587c826e3
Manifesto for agile software development. (2001). Retrieved July 25, 2021, from
http://agilemanifesto.org/
Upfront Design for Six Sigma (DFSS): A Road map to excellence [Video file]. (2015, June 24).
Retrieved July 25, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l0m9BOSiQA
Creveling, C. M., Slutsky, J. L., & Antis, D., Jr. (2002). Design for Six sigma in technology and
product development. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/what-is-design-thinking-and-why-is-it-so-popular
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/what-is-design-thinking-and-why-is-it-so-popular
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXtN4y3O35M
https://www.lean.org/WhatsLean/
- Abstract
Introduction
Design Thinking
Lean
Agile
Design for Six Sigma
Findings and Recommendations
Conclusion
References