Toyota's Principles of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering

Not well documented to date, the design and development system of Toyota Motor Corporation contributes greatly to the firm's remarkably consistent growth in market share and its enviable profit per vehicle. This article, which extends the authors' previous study of the Toyota product development system, reports on further data collection in Japan and at the Toyota Technical Center in Michigan. Findings substantiate the authors' previous claims about the product development system and lead them to conclude that Toyota is "set-based" in its approaches. Set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE) begins by broadly considering sets of possible solutions (in parallel and relatively independently) and gradually narrowing the set of possibilities to converge on a final solution. Gradually eliminating weaker solutions increases the likelihood of finding the best or better solutions. In this way, Toyota can move more quickly toward convergence and production than their traditional, "point-based" counterparts. The authors develop the SBCE idea by describing three principles that guide Toyota's decision making in design: (1) simultaneous mapping of the design space according to functional expertise, (2) "integration by intersection" of mutually acceptable functional refinements introduced by the design and manufacturing engineering groups, and (3) establishment of feasibility before commitment. The authors also present a conceptual framework tied to the Toyota development system and discuss why the SBCE principles lead to highly effective product development. Findings suggest that a change to a distributed, concurrent engineering environment should involve a corresponding change in design method to a set-based process. Product development organizations able to master and apply SBCE principles and Toyota's principles for integrating systems and cultivating organizational knowledge may be able to radically improve their design and development processes.

[1]  Harold R. Buhl.  Creative Engineering Design , 1960 .

[2]  Richard L. Daft,et al.  Organizational information requirements, media richness and structural design , 1986 .

[3]  S. Winter,et al.  An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change.by Richard R. Nelson; Sidney G. Winter , 1987 .

[4]  Taiichi Ohno,et al.  Toyota Production System : Beyond Large-Scale Production , 1988 .

[5]  Tomás Lozano-Pérez,et al.  Extending the constraint propagation of intervals , 1989, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing.

[6]  Michael L. Tushman,et al.  Technology, Organizations and Innovation: An Introduction , 1990 .

[7]  Erik K. Antonsson,et al.  Trade-off strategies in engineering design , 1991 .

[8]  Jeffrey L. Funk,et al.  Japanese product-development strategies: A summary and propositions about their implementation , 1993 .

[9]  Computer Staff,et al.  The Machine That Changed the World , 1992 .

[10]  Michael Burda,et al.  Revolutionizing product development , 1993 .

[11]  Frank A. Dubinskas,et al.  Modeling cultures of project management , 1993 .

[12]  Allen C. Ward,et al.  Conceptual robustness in simultaneous engineering: An extension of Taguchi's parameter design , 1994 .

[13]  Karl T. Ulrich,et al.  Product Design and Development , 1995 .

[14]  Michael A. Cusumano,et al.  Multiproject strategy, design transfer, and project performance: a survey of automobile development projects in the US and Japan , 1995 .

[15]  Rajan R. Kamath,et al.  A Second Look at Japanese Product Development , 1995 .

[16]  K. Eisenhardt,et al.  Accelerating Adaptive Processes: Product Innovation in the Global Computer Industry , 1995 .

[17]  M. Iansiti.  Shooting the Rapids: Managing Product Development in Turbulent Environments , 1995 .

[18]  I. Nonaka,et al.  How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation , 1995 .

[19]  Durward K. Sobek,et al.  Involving suppliers in product development in the United States and Japan: evidence for set-based concurrent engineering , 1996 .

[20]  M. Crossan.  The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation , 1996 .

[21]  Durward Kenneth Sobek.  Principles that shape product development systems : a Toyota-Chrysler comparison , 1997 .

[22]  Stefan H. Thomke,et al.  The Role of Flexibility in the Development of New Products , 1997 .

[23]  Robert P. Smith,et al.  A predictive model of sequential iteration in engineering design , 1997 .

[24]  Gurumurthy Kalyanaram,et al.  Deliberate Product Definition: Customizing the Product Definition Process , 1997 .

[25]  Michael A. Cusumano,et al.  How Microsoft Makes Large Teams Work Like Small Teams , 1997 .

[26]  Durward K. Sobek,et al.  Another look at how Toyota integrates product development , 1998 .

[27]  V. Mahajan,et al.  Managing New Product Definition in Highly Dynamic Environments , 1998 .