Lucent Technologies'
Fiber Optic Cable Development
-
-
-
-
Lucent
Technologies is the world leading supplier of networking technology to
large telecommunications service providers around the world.
Lucent Technologies' Outside Plant Fiber Optic
Cable business Unit designs, develops, manufactures and sells Fiber Optic
Cables that are used in an outside
environment. The largest of its customers continually demand new designs to meet their special
circumstances.
Two
years ago Lucent's product realization cycle for Fiber Optic Cable was
about the same as its competitors. A major problem was designs based on
new materials took a very long time to come to market. And of course, as
in many product development organizations, many of the designers were
overloaded and multi-tasking on several projects simultaneously.
It
was clear that to continue increasing profitability, and reduce the
overload on the designers, it was necessary to markedly improve the
product development process. This included significantly reducing the product introduction
interval.
Within
Lucent Technologies is a group of people, led by Harold Lunde, who
champion Theory Of Constraints as an improvement technology.
At the time of this Case Study, Tony Rizzo was a very active part
of this group. Through
Lucent’s Learning and Performance Center they put on a series Two Day
Project Management Workshops which
led to several business groups deciding to implement TOC Project
Management.
The
Technical Manager of the Outside Plant Cable design and development group,
attended a TOC Project Management Workshop and decided that the Critical
Chain approach could help solve their problem. He convinced his Director,
who scheduled a management session with Tony Rizzo, and an implementation
facilitated by Dick Franks of the Goldratt Institute
Lucent
began by running TOC Project Management workshops for all the members of
the Outside Plant Cable organization (management, development, engineering
and product management) that would be involved in the change so they would
1.
Understand
and buy-in to the change, and
2.
Be
involved in planning and modifying the implementation to fit their
circumstances.
Dick
Franks facilitated the implementation of TOC Multi-Project Management in
the organization, including training most of the people, conducting the
initial project planning and scheduling sessions, and integrating the
projects into a single plan based on scheduling the Drum. This first
training, planning and scheduling phase took three months including about
2 months during which the team planned scheduled additional projects.
Once
the first few projects were scheduled, weekly buffer updates and buffer
tracking meetings were held with the cross-functional organizations by
conference call. The purpose of the meetings was to both track the
projects as part of the standard development process, and also to watch
the TOC Project Management implementation process and make modifications
when problems occurred. These
meetings are on going. Dick
took part weekly for the first six months, then took part twice a month
for another 8 months.
Comparing
the year before implementing TOC Project Management with the year after,
with no increase in staffing nor change in project scope,
1.
The
product introduction interval was reduced by 50%,
2.
On
-time delivery was markedly improved to above 95%,
3.
The
organization's capacity to develop products tripled, and
4.
The
organization's revenue improved 30% resulting in a multi-million dollar
profit improvement.
|