Eight Months Early and 20% Under Budget

ConMed Electrosurgery had a consistent track record—new product development projects for their most complicated product line took thirty months on average to complete. However, they had completed one in twenty months on one occasion. So they set a goal to beat that record by 10% and complete their next project in eighteen months…

"Cutting the project time by 50% is not something you can just sort of ignore."

                                                                –VP R&D

However, there was one major problem. There was already a major design project that was late that was consuming most of the resources. In order to complete the new project, they were going to have to rely on a new hire in the critical mechanical engineering role, and use a part time project manager from Marketing that had never managed a full NPD project before.

So they decided this was a good time to try something different.

Ken Taylor, the Engineering VP had just read Don Reinertsen’s Managing the Design Factory book and was interested in implementing the principles, so he hired Accuer (the founders of Playbook) to help. After a thorough root cause assessment to determine what was causing the project delays, they customized eight different methods from Lean, Agile and Theory of Constraints. The end result was this project was completed in twelve months—literally eight months faster than their goal, and eighteen months faster than their average. And this was in spite of the fact that it was the second most important project in the company at the time.

An additional benefit to being early was the project came in 20% under budget. As Ken Taylor said, “Not only do you have the revenue increase potential at the end, but we’ve actually spent less money.”