Leigh M. Stewart
lean NpD for cool, sophisticated
products plus other newly released
NpD books
leigh M. Stewart, Visions NpD Resources editor, Senior consultant, Sutton
enterprises inc. ( lmstewart@suttonenterprises.com)
The Lean Machine: How Harley-Davidson Drove Top-Line
Growth and Profitability With Revolutionary Lean Product
Development
By Dantar P. Oosterwal (AMACOM, 2010)
“By 1985 Harley-Davidson was nearly bankrupt.”1 A group
of executives had purchased the firm and implemented changes
to manufacturing, addressed quality issues, and revamped its
management approach. By the early 1990s Harley was seeing
results from these changes but realized it needed to change its
product development structure to create sustainable growth. This
book is the story of how Harley-Davidson made the change from
a traditional product development process to a knowledge-based
product development environment. The most telling result is that
the firm went from developing 0.74 models per year to creating
4. 6 models per year (starting around 2004) with significantly fewer
launch and post-launch issues.
The book has three
parts. First, the tradition-
al product development
process is described in
Chapter 1. Then Chap-
ters 2 to 7 discuss the
management structure
changes at Harley-Da-
vidson. These changes
resulted in a learning en-
vironment that fostered
the journey to improve
product development.
In the early 1990s, the leadership of Harley-Davidson estab-
lished a new organizational structure that focused on finding
new customers, manufacturing products, and providing the sup-
port these activities require. They formed three groups, each of
which comprised leaders who represented the specific functions
within the business objective of that group—Create Demand
Circle, Produce Products Group, and Provide Support Circle.
Peter Senge’s work related to organizational learning (The Fifth
Discipline) greatly influenced several members of these teams
who then created related learning teams. The Produce Products
Group sponsored the creation of a learning team, called the
Product Development Leadership Learning Team (PDL2 T), to
improve Harley-Davidson’s product development process. This
became an important incubator for understanding and improving
product development. 2
The PDL2T used systems thinking to create a shared vision of
the Harley-Davidson product development process and identify
“The majority of these misses occurred because project teams
thought something was feasible
but learned later that it was
not—this was termed ‘false
positive feasibility.’ ”
problem areas, such as firefighting. “A firefighting organization
requires extraordinary people to achieve ordinary results. In an
exceptional organization, ordinary people achieve extraordinary
results.” 3 Through review of launch assessment reports and analy-
sis of the systems models, the team identified the need to establish
cadence and flow to make product development more effective
and efficient. To implement cadence and flow, Harley-Davidson
defined six categories, or “bins,” of projects “based on the risk
associated with delivering the project, and the magnitude of the
project.” 4 “Bin designations allowed the organization to operate
at peak efficiency by rightsizing projects as a part of the life cycle
plan. Bin designation also facilitated portfolio and life cycle
management by aligning a cadence of projects to flow through
the product development system.” 5
While establishing cadence and flow were positive changes, the
PDL2T realized projects were missing the same gates for the same
reasons across the portfolio year after year. The majority of these
misses occurred because project teams thought something was
feasible but learned later that it was not—this was termed “false
positive feasibility.” To address this, the team structured “integra-
tion points” into the projects. “Integration points are significant
events that bring together a meaningful cross section of the organi-
zation to accomplish some aspect of product development critical
to the project. They force communication, provide natural check
points, and set the tempo for product development.” 6 Between
integration points, project teams focused on designing and execut-
ing experiments that create specific pieces of knowledge, usually
in the form of limit or trade-off curves, to solve particular issues.
For the integration
Chapter 15 describes how Harley-Davidson used the oobeya pro-
cess at three levels to manage the product development progression
and escalate and resolve issues. Harley-Davidson created and used
oobeya rooms for product development Leadership, Projects, and
System/Departments. The Leadership oobeya gave an overview
of the entire product development system, including improvement
“Harley-Davidson has uccessfully changed its
product development process
as evidenced by its dramatic
increase in new product
throughput.”
