Two Half-Day Workshops – May 4, 2015
8:00 AM or 1:30 PM - Fargo ND
Ramada Plaza Suites, 1635 42nd St South

Lean Product Development provides companies with "innovative" ways to design and produce.   Begin to learn how to integrate lean tools with product development in your company.

What is the Lean Product Development workshop?

To help support more successful company innovation, to streamline activities and optimize product and idea generation, Impact Dakota is introducing Lean Product Development via two workshops in Fargo on Monday, May 4, 2015.  These half-day workshops introduce you to the basic concepts of Lean Product Development.  We will demonstrate Lean Product Development tools that can help your company with:

• Integrating the product development team,

  Lean Product Development Half-Day Workshop May 4, 2015 8:00 – 11:30 AM or 1:30 – 5:00PM Cost: $99 per person Registration is available online now by visiting www.impactdakota.com Or by contacting Dan Halverson, Impact Dakota at 701-328-5472 or danh@impactdakota.com

• Improving the deployment of design and development resources,
• Improving product differentiation and portfolio management,
• Improving time to market,
• Reducing product cost and
• Reducing risk.

The open-enrollment workshops will introduce you to a Lean Product Development process that can be easily scaled to your company’s size and need, while providing insight and tools to begin the journey to transform their product design and development activity into a low waste, high value, lean process.

Who should attend?  Why?

Company Owners, Chief Executive Officers, Presidents, and Engineering Managers.   This workshop gets company leaders engaged in examining their product development activities and process through ten “lenses” of best-in-class Lean Product Development methods. It provides sample tools and methods for each “lens” that allows for discussion and planning of follow-on action(s).

Each lens is supported by a real-world case example of successful Lean Product Development implementation. The goal of the workshop is to focus the potential of Lean Product Development to their companies’ shortcomings in the product development and launch arena, and demonstrate methods and tools available to make rapid and significant improvements in resource utilization, product differentiation, time to market and risk mitigation, translating directly to their bottom lines.

What is the problem?

When assessing the success a company realizes from Innovation the results are not always good.  More than 80% of all new product efforts fail!  Over 60% of all new product development efforts are terminated before they ever reach the marketplace.

Yet – without Innovation to bring meaningfully unique value to our markets – our products reach maturity and decline – along with the viability of our company.

Generating ideas and processes for new products can be a challenge caused by a sporadic or chaotic innovation process, or non-value added engineering activities, both of which result in a less-than-fluid process for creating fresh concepts or renewed designs.

Companies that use a structured approach to new product development have a 400% increased probability of success with new products, 25% increased probability of being first to market, and a 66% reduction in time to market.

What is Lean Product Development?

Lean Product Development is the application of lean principles to product development. Lean Product Development speeds the time to market by eliminating the root causes of time-consuming and expensive design changes.  In reducing the time, Lean Product Development also helps reduce the costs and risks involved in product development.

Many Lean Product Development practices operate within early product development.  As a result, by the time products reach late development, the quality of the design is largely determined and the opportunities for improvement are fewer and less impactful.

Ed Maier – Our Workshop Presenter

Product Development expert, Ed Maier, will present companies with an overview of Lean Product Development, exploring methods and tools that can help with your product development challenges.   Ed works with the Department of Commerce’s NIST-MEP network to help domestic manufacturers create innovation, new products and improve their product development results.  Ed is a Certified Lean Product Development Master Instructor, an Innovation Engineering “Trained Brain”, Business Growth Coach and Systematic Inventive Thinking Method Coach.  He also has extensive training in Technology Driven Market Intelligence and Technology Scouting methods.

Ed has over 30 years of experience in product development and leading teams in technology, product and process development – including a major commitment to working with domestic and overseas original equipment manufacturers and suppliers in the automotive industry.  In addition to his automotive experience, Ed founded and profitably grew a medical devices start-up company and led the marketing and engineering efforts of the medical products company that later purchased his business.  Ed is fluent in German and holds 8 patents.

About Impact Dakota

Impact Dakota was established in 2001 and is dedicated to helping companies improve business results through continuous improvement, innovation, and the development of people.  The success of Impact Dakota is measured by the benefits and impacts realized by the companies served. Through an independent 3rd party project follow-up process, companies have reported $459M in benefits and impacts and 2,733 jobs created or retained from 678 improvement projects.

Impact Dakota is an affiliate of the U.S. Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology Manufacturing Extension Partnership – the nation’s largest business assistance network dedicated to developing domestic manufacturing and related industries.  For more information, visit www.impactdakota.com.