Adapt technology to fit your people and process The first rule of any technology used in business is that

automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. Companies around the world are trying to find ways to accelerate product development, seeing this as a way to improve competitive advantage. In many cases, their efforts to speed up the PD process focus on advanced technology. But using rapid prototyping, digital simulations, product lifecycle management, virtual engineering, and similar tool and technology to revolutionize PD may not yield the hoped for result, primarily because technologies are seldom exclusive. Any company can copy or purchase the tool and technology depends on the ability to customize them in a way that makes them exclusive and integrates them uniquely to the company using them. No one, for example, can deny that that tools and technologies have and a significant influence on Toyotas ability to archive development cycles of 15 months and less. But it is important to recognize that this occurred because Toyota has had the foresight and discipline to customize tools and technology to fit within a broader framework, one that includes people and process. Five primary principles for choosing tools and technology Finding ones way though the technojungle in easy task. Rapidly changing functionality along with the jungles many hidden hazards makes identifying and choosing the correct path difficult. Decisions about which tools or technology to adopt and when how to integrate them into the organization have significant implications for a companys PD system. The

4. Specific solution oriented: not a silver bullet. Technology can provide high-leverage if a company has a clearly defined purpose for it. Searching for a nonexistent Holy Grail is futile. Technology is never a substitute for the hard work that is required to make a product development system competitive. Its potential lies in supporting and accelerating that hard work once a lean process is in place and highly skilled people are appropriately trained and organized. 5. right size-notking sized. Many western companies have a tendency to buy the biggest, baddest, fasted, and newest tools on market. Our old friend NAC, for instance, often boasts that it is going to leapfrog Toyota by technological one-upmanship. This, however, seldom happens and the following example illustrates why. For decades, Toyota has successfully used notebooks for its engineering checklist. NAC developed an impressive online and fully integrated data base,