The VUCA world requires a great speed of reaction, and an approach of continuous adaptation.
The development of any physical product from idea to its mass production generally goes through some known macro-steps.
These steps normally occur in a temporal sequence, that is, “cascading,” one after the other. This method is therefore named Waterfall.
To reduce the time from conception to the start of repetitive production, the moment from which the company begins to recover its expenses incurred through sales revenues, partial overlapping of phases has long been adopted.
The only phase that has no overlap with the later ones is the initial phase within which the feasibility of the product is verified or a “Proof of Concept” or Proof of Concept is constructed.
This is an important stage that is intended to test whether or not to initiate the development of a new product.
Partial overlapping of successive phases such as design, construction, assembly , validation and industrialization, which precede release for series production, occurs by sacrificing the time available for each phase with the risk of their only partial completion.
This has increasingly become a necessity justified by the cost incurred by companies in ‘introducing the product to the market later.
Coupled with this is the fact that with a cascading approach, even with partially overlapping phases, it is very difficult to effectively pursue “Concurrent Design” or “Concurrent Engineering” i.e., design that takes into account a multiplicity of aspects including product construction aspects.
This implies that during the industrialization phase the product may be heavily revised, with demanding design activities frequently involving the construction of a second prototype.
Extra development costs are then added up with the costs of late market introduction.
In 1986, the two professors Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi published the famous article in the Harvard Business Review, titled “The New New Product Development Game,” within which they described the ways in which the development stages adopted by the most innovative companies of the day overlapped strongly.
The authors of this groundbreaking article describe this small-step development approach with a compact team in similarity to a rugby scrum pack, which is why they call this approach Scrum. They thus anticipate the concepts that a few years later will be structured within the Agile approach, and successfully applied in the software industry.
The application of complete or nearly complete phase overlap for physical products is much more complex to implement than that required in the software world.
The iterative and incremental Agile approach applied to the world of physical products (Agile for Hardware) is the possible answer that must take into account, however, the fact that the iterative part (redo or modification) becomes very onerous when the physical product is under construction.
With the arrival of digital twins and virtualization in general, it is possible to postpone the transition to physical construction while at the same time accelerated construction techniques such as the additive manufacturing o Subtractive machining done with computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) systems that rapidly process three-dimensional geometries designed with 3D CAD systems, for high-speed machining (High-Speed Machining) on multi-axis CNC machines, enable previously unthinkable speed in the development of physical products.
All of these approaches can be very expensive, compared to conventional construction methods, and are justified only when paid for by the reduction in the Cost of Delay (Cost of Delay or CoD). To this can be added the lower redesign costs of industrialization and possible second construction of an industrialized prototype.
With the teams I have coordinated over the years. we have developed with the approach Agile more than 50 industrial machines, and in addition to the reduction in the cost of delay the great thing gained was also the very large reductions in redesign activities, because industrialization was pursued with the cross-functional teams from the very first design activities.
