Teamworking and concurrent engineering a success story

Rob Kinna

The author Rob Kinna is Engineering Development Manager at Four Square Division of Mars UK Ltd. He has been involved in new product design for Agricultural and Horticultural equipment manufacturers, and for the last 11 years for Four Square Division of Mars. His roles within Four Square have included production management, plant and maintenance management, and equipment development. Rob Kinna can be contacted at Four Square, Armstrong Road, Basingstoke, Hants, RG24 8NU. Tel: 01256 487326. Abstract Shares the experiences and successes of adopting concurrent engineering. Highlights the criticality of team selection, building and empowerment. Suggests that the concept of a team should not be restricted to an internal group but ought to include customers and suppliers.

World Class Design to Manufacture Volume 2 Number 3 1995 pp. 59 MCB University Press ISSN 1352-3074

Four Square is a division of Mars GB Ltd. However, it is somewhat different to the typical Mars Company in that it manufactures drink systems that include not only the packaged drinks (KLIX and FLAVIA) which are closely aligned with the mainstream products, but it also develops and manufactures the associated drink vending machines through which the products are sold. These are in many respects the companys shops. The company has its manufacturing base and main research centre at Basingstoke in Hampshire and has sales and service units in France, Germany and Japan, together with a small development team based in Italy. Its current markets cover all of Europe, Scandinavia and Japan a market which the company has recently entered and is very proud to have won. The companys management style is truly open with a very honest approach, enhanced by an open-plan ofce with the inherent ease of access to one another. There are no private ofces; in fact all the corporations ofces are entirely open plan and there is no difference between the furniture the managing director has or that of a bought ledger clerk. There are no secretaries in the traditional sense if a memo needs typing, it is done by the individuals themselves and distributed likewise that way memos are kept to a minimum since it is probably more effective and quicker to talk to or phone the relevant person and sort out the issue there and then. This aspect of the company works is worth emphasizing as it has provided an excellent basis on which to build a concurrent engineering approach to product development. For instance, by knowing all the people in sales, marketing, purchasing, etc., it is possible to get a decision agreed in minutes, through direct contact rather than having to arrange a formal meeting to resolve even a minor issue. That is not to say that formal meetings do not exist, but they tend to concentrate on more meaty topics. The company also gains considerable benets from the cosmopolitan make up of its population, in which there are nationals from many countries based in all the various locations. However, even with this existing approach, there was a certain element of divisional barriers; clearly these were only psychological, since the open-plan ofce meant that there never had been physical barriers. 5

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Rob Kinna

The Flavia drink system produced by Four Square

A Klix drink vending machine, produced by Four Square

Thus, if everything was set up to make teamworking a natural thing, why was this not always being achieved? The answers are quite simple. In a company which runs a eld-based customer and technical servce network across Europe and in Japan, and which depends entirely on sub-contract component manufacture for the parts that assembles into machines, the physical barriers do exist in that few of the people from either end of the pipeline (customers, eld technicians or suppliers) were ever invited in to the development phase of the products they were all outside the ofce and were not seen as part of the team.

Customer and supplier input

It does not take great intelligence to work out what the rst move was: bring in people from the whole chain to form the development team and put life into the bland numbers which are in the specication; enable people, to meet one another and understand the other persons point of view and needs. The company had been reducing its supplier base for several years and identifying longterm partners driven by quality, JIT and other efciencies. Consequently there was little resistance in this aspect again a good position to be in and one which most compa6

nies are working towards. All the company had to do was to share more information with the suppliers and invite them to bring their specialist skills and experiences to bear on the product; in all cases this has had a mutually benecial effect. At the customer end of the process, the company started to ensure that the R&D engineers were on the agenda for client visits, so that they could hear at rst hand what the clients wanted rather than what the salesman said they wanted. This is an important distinction and not a swipe at sales people, since everyone is sensitive to their own areas of competence and will hear slightly different messages in any conversation and react accordingly. Engineers can pick up on comments which a non-technical person may have missed and therefore not included in the specication. This approach has also meant that the customers have become living people for the engineers. As the projects progress, checks on progress and interpretations are frequently undertaken with groups of customers, and designs modied where appropriate. There are risks here, since the company is clearly raising expectations a long time prior to launch and inevitable exposing the development programme to competitors. But, so far neither issue has been signicant in fact due

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Rob Kinna

to their early involvement, some very powerful brand loyalty is being seen from customers, with Four Square products specied in their long-term plans.

Growing enthusiasm
It cannot be emphasized enough how useful the course and the use of 3D CAD were. Remember that most of those in the team were not trained engineers and had never been involved in any product developments. The course showed how asking a few simple questions could lead to dramatic reductions in parts count, minimize opportunities for mistakes, and improve reliability. Three-dimensional representations of items and assemblies on the CAD screen cut away the confusion of 2D engineering drawings covered in dimensions, and suddenly here was a team of people, who were used to living with the mistakes of the past actually changing their future through inuencing the design by drawing on their considerable experience. The teams enthusiasm spread outwards back to the root divisions, and as a result the whole programme was received in a a very positive light across the business. As the project progressed, more people wanted to become associated with it and the team was able to ofoad some elements which had traditonally been handled by R&D things like the technical manual, operators guides, build instructions and product labels were all handled in parallel by people and areas of the business far better qualied and closer to the end user than R&D and that meant the team could spend more time on the areas which demanded its skills. One particular measure stands out as the turning point (in what can be called the quiet revolution) for many of those who struggled to see the value of this approach in the early days. The project undertaken by the new team was to replace a machine in the range, with one of twice the capacity, twice the choice and many more features, and this was achieved with an overall reduction in parts count of 40 per cent compared to the original machine. This was an outstanding achievement, well beyond even the most optimistic hopes. It brought with it many efciencies and savings right across the business, and therefore made the benets of this approach more tangible to those who were still looking for proof of the validity of this concurrent approach. This is not to say that reduced part count is the only benet to be gained, and it may be that in businesses there are more pertinent measures. But, it is not always clear which measure or aspect will gain the most support 7

The next step

Looking back inside the organization it is important to consider the lifetime of this type of product. At the development stages, there is lots of focus and enthusiasm heavy investment brings with it heavy attention and a high prole in the business the features and aesthetics are exciting and draw lots of debate. However, all too frequently, once launched, the focus shifts on to the next new toy and away from the production and the eld service teams who actually live with the products for the rest of their life, people who were traditionally not part of the development team and in the case of the eld technicians people who are located remote from the development centre. Thus, yet again, the next stage now appears to have been blindingly obvious, bring in the production and eld associates to the development team; in fact, why not go all the way and set up a dedicated, multi-discipline team, located in one area and trust it will work? However, new techniques are hard to sell and here was yet another to go with FMEA, SPC, Taguchi, QFD and so on, and it involved requesting others to give up their people to help R&D do its job better; moreover, what were the real benets going to be? How could it be proved? The rst stage was to explain that concurrent engineering is not a technique it is more of a cultural change which involves teamworking across divisional boundaries. As far as proving that it was the best way forward was concerned, this could not be proved but it was possible to make a start in the right direction. Some areas could see the benets and were happy to accept the penalty of running light handed for some months, and so the process started with a nucleus of two CAD designers, one eld technician, one production line builder, a production engineer and a member of the quality team. This nucleus spent a day with the Smallpiece Trust on its Design for Assembly course in order to learn a method for assessing the designs, and then the team set about assessing the design concepts around the CAD screens.

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Rob Kinna

and help demolish any resistance to the changes in the way companies work. Time to market is the main aspect often quoted, but the concurrent approach yields other benets along the way and especially in the early stages, while adapting to this approach, it may even take longer than the old way, but still deliver other benets of equal magnitude. Then the time-to-market benets follows, as teams become better at this style of working.

What is happening now?

Todays project teams have developed from these early moves, building on the successes and modifying the approach where necessary. The remainder of this article will describe the current state of the evolution of project teams at Four Square. Once it has been agreed that the project looks promising and worthy of our investment, the rst consideration is who will be in the team, starting with team leader. Traditionally the company would look at the product and assign the leadership role to the person at the centre of the technology involved. Thus if it was an equipment project, the project engineer would be made the project manager but why? The logic went that since this person was most heavily involved, he/she should manage the whole project. However, the true effect was only to load up the most highly loaded person even more, and expect him/her to manage areas of the business unrelated to their natural skills or experience, areas which were not dedicated to the project and had differing priorities. This often meant that these important details, like operators guides or brochure photographs, were last minute affairs and turned out to be expensive and affected the critical path of the whole project. Today the company selects a project manager for managerial capability, width of experience and knowledge, and he/she is as likely to come from marketing, sales or manufacturing as from R&D. As regards the team members, the company considers the priority of the project compared with an individuals current loading, the skills required and the need to look for a multi-discipline structure which is dedicated to the successful outcome of all the elements of the project. Clearly, not all of the people are needed all of the time, but it is important to ensure that their priorities are set to reect their role in the project. Some people may 8

therefore be an active member of several projects at any one time, while others are dedicated to a single activity. Co-location is a major requirement for success it is amazing how big a factor this is. For instance, it is very noticeable that when looking for a new car, the type wanted suddenly appears to be everywhere. It is not that they were not there before, it is just that there is now a greater sensitivity to them. It is the same when in a crowded room and someone mentions an individual the chances are that they will hear it even if it is said over the other side of the room. It is this sensitivity to what is important, that is at the heart of why being colocated has an enormous effect on the project success. There are always formal project meetings and debriefs but it is often in the informal comments or even the overheard conversations that highly relevant information changes hand. As a simple example the sales support manager was deciding with the print supplier the format and size of some promotional leaets. The engineer designing the consumer interface was not in the meeting but sat at his desk close by and heard the magic words consumer interface his ears pricked up and he joined in the conversation. The result is that instead of a promotional sticker, which used to get stuck on the outside of the machines in a haphazard fashion, there is now a neat pocket built into the interface where the operator can slip in the poster, maintain the aesthetics of the machine and avoid the problem of removing the sticker once that promotion has ended. Not only is this cheaper, it is also a more professional result. That is one small and perhaps trivial example but it does illustrate the type of benet which can arise from the co-location of the team. As already mentioned, the ability to co-locate is made very easy by our open-plan environment.

Team responsibility
Once the main team members, they then take on the responsibility for carrying out a feasibility study on the project. This can cover anything from paperwork exercises through to the construction of prototypes which are tested in the market research whatever it takes to allow a comprehensive and realistic project plan and funding proposal to be built and presented for approval. Provided that the team has been drawn from the right areas of the business, the plan should include all the

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associated activities which historically got missed due to lack of appreciation by the project engineer working on his own. It will also include requests for other people to join the team if it has been found that there is a gap which has become apparent during the feasibility stage. The team believes in the plan and feels ownership for its delivery in other words it is not a plan which has been forced on to them without their views being included. This is a vital aspect and one where the senior managers have to learn to trust and accept what the team view is it demands a hands-off approach. As management have empowered these people to deliver a project, the worst thing they can do is to disempower the team either at the planning stage or later, when things go off plan, to wade in and show them how to do it! The team will work together much better if left alone, as the feeling of true ownership is there and they want desperately to achieve the targets they have set pride is a great motivator. Ideally, the team will be sent on a teambuilding exercise at the start of the feasibility stage. There are numerous alternatives here but it is important to make sure it has the objective of team building as its goal and does not result in wrecking the self-condence of individual members swimming under a yacht is all very macho stuff but not particularly relevant to building project teams. Trust building courses are much more appropriate, or even just having a relaxed time together, which allows people to get to know the facets of their colleagues they never see at work. The objective here is to build a team whose relationships are bigger and stronger than the challenges that the project can throw at it.

some fundamental aws in the original specication. That point was a real watershed. Here was a team of relatively junior people standing up and changing the direction the business was taking. Because they rmly believed in what they were trying to achieve and felt real ownership, they were prepared to voice their concerns openly in a positive fashion. To their great credit, the senior management listened and trusted the teams views and sanctioned the changes. It meant more expense and a longer lead time, never popular consequences, but we can now see the results in the emerging product, which the customers are hailing as having achieved all that was promised and more.

Summary
In conclusion, the following is a list of recommendations for any company embarking, or considering, similar organizational change to that achieved by Four Square: Any change takes some selling, there is inertia to overcome, and those not closely related to the traditional processes may not be as able to see the benets until some event occurs which captures their imagination in Four Squares case it was the parts-count reduction which lit the enthusiasm. Start the changes in a small way and let the results speak for themselves. Once the approach is seen to be working and support is growing, step up a gear and build on your experiences. Co-location, whenever practical, is a critical factor for success. Four Square found 3D CAD to be a signicant tool in enabling the less technical team members to contribute to the development at the earliest possible stage. As rapid prototyping techniques become more available the company will start using them to enhance further the understanding of all those involved in the products while still at the concept phase. Involve as many people as possible from the pipeline particularly customers and suppliers. Trust-based relationships are essential. Put effort into the team: select carefully, invest in building it and then trust it and listen to it it is the companys most valuable asset. 9

Recent results
What of the recent results from the projects the company has run this way? Personally, not being part of the team, which has been built on the principles that were rst brought in now some three years ago, it is interesting to be in the position of an observer. The product being developed is proving to be several orders of magnitude better than anything done in the past no matter what measures are applied it is better. The spirit in the team is superb and it has had the courage to stop and change direction early on when it became apparent that there were