Many manufacturers that re-engineer their product-development processes often turn to concurrent engineering—conducting most or all phases of a development effort simultaneously rather than tackling them one by one. Sometimes, however, performing discrete tasks faster won't be enough, and all-encompassing changes in the way a company interacts with its employees, suppliers, and customers are needed to achieve a quantum leap.

The Document Centre 265—the first copier to come out of Xerox's re-engineered product-development process—has only 250 replaceable parts, compared with 2,000 parts in a traditional copier.

Xerox Corp. in Webster, N.Y., is a case in point. "In 1992, Xerox had an ambitious vision," said John Elter, vice president of strategic programs in Xerox's Office Document Products Group. "We saw the need for an extensible, modular, digital platform that would serve as the basis for an entire family of new products. These new products would span a wide price range and offer customers a variety of different functions, but all would have the same basic foundation.

"To accomplish this goal in the desired time frame," Elter said, "we needed to completely rethink the way that we did our jobs."

That was the start of a re-engineering effort in Elter's group that, over the past five years, has affected all aspects of the jobs of virtually everyone involved with the new product platform. Although Xerox was no stranger to concurrent engineering, the traditional methods would have taken too long on this project. Rather, the development team needed to design the entire platform and all of its products concurrently, necessitating the management of multiple projects at the same time.

The goal was the simultaneous design of a number of different modules that would serve as a basis for producing many different products. "We knew that we needed to make a paradigm shift not only in the product but also in the way it is designed, manufactured, serviced, and supported," Elter said. "Not only was the technology of this platform new but we also redesigned the processes, which has spawned a whole way of managing projects at Xerox."

The first step in the re-engineering process was to relocate everyone involved with the project in a brand-new facility designed to support the project's goals. "There are no doors, and all offices and conference rooms have windows," Elter said. "Everyone can see what's going on. This type of facility is now standard at Xerox."

This philosophy of breaking down barriers also carried over into day-to-day management of employees. Xerox's strategic programs team has drafted what it calls an Employee Bill of Rights. This document states that employees have a right to be listened to without being judged, for example, and should not be made to feel wrong even if someone disagrees with them.

The Xerox team has also initiated a process called goal convergence, which allows the group's multifunctional teams to arrive at their goals themselves rather than having the goals dictated to them by senior management. One benefit of this approach is that the new processes automatically got a buy-in even at the lowest level.

"On Monday mornings, the teams meet and decide what they want to accomplish for that week," Elter said. "They meet again on Friday afternoon to discuss what they actually did accomplish. If they don't meet their goals, the team has to determine the reason. The team as a whole as well as the individual members are accountable."

Depending on the specific job function, some members of the team are also permitted to make their own hours—as long as they make the two mandatory weekly meetings. This shifted the focus away from having to be in the office between prescribed hours and toward accomplishing what needed to be done.

"Our design people don't like ambiguity," Elter said. "They like to have a tightly defined mission and a vision. Once the team sets the goals, the members are left alone to do what they need to do. The result has been increased productivity and heightened job satisfaction."

Although the company made considerable managerial changes, the re-engineering effort also addressed the product-development process itself. For example, the new Xerox platform incorporated a number of brand-new technologies. To meet prescribed delivery times, the development teams had to bring these technologies to maturity at the same time while they executed the design of components. To accomplish this, Xerox focused heavily on robust design—maximizing the performance of each subsystem by looking at its ideal function.

"For example, if the cap doesn't fit on a pen properly," Elter said, "the pen leaks and stains the customer's shirt, and the customer gets upset. Therefore, the ideal function of the cap is for the user to know that it's on the pen properly." In a robust design effort, engineers would figure out how to construct the cap and the knob of the pen so that customers could hear the pen cap click when it is firmly in place.

Xerox also adopted critical-parameter management or, as the company calls it, quality function deployment (QFD). "QFD is a way of deploying the voice of the customer to the factory floor," Elter said. "If a sheet of paper in a copier must arrive at a certain position, the critical parameter is nominal value of arrival time. If the customer wants a machine that never jams, at the system level there are parameters associated with a machine having a very low jam rate. The critical parameters required for the paper to not jam—such as torques, forces, and electric fields—are ultimately controlled all the way down to the factory floor. By tracking these parameters and making sure that they are within prescribed limits, we ensure that critical performance parameters are achieved."

Communicating customer expectations throughout the company was accompanied by a shift in emphasis from problem solving to problem prevention. The effort to keep engineers focused on customer expectations goes beyond tracking critical parameters. "We're trying to get away from metrics that talk about defects," Elter said, "and we're getting into metrics that talk about function. It's a subtle point, but it's important to get out of the in-spec/out-of-spec mentality."

In documenting function metrics, Xerox has found a way to capture and promulgate critical knowledge—its "intellectual capital"—simultaneously throughout the company. By recording such metrics, Xerox helps ensure that when a design is produced on the factory floor, the rationale for choosing a particular material, for example, is preserved, even if the individuals on the team who designed the product in the first place are no longer with the company.

One of the most important points of the re-engineering process was that it had to be adopted throughout Xerox to be effective. Since some of Xerox's processes are not done in-house, the company is training vendors in the use of its new tools.

Elter's group also undertook an extensive benchmarking program that lasted nine months. Essentially, the team obtained its competitors' products and completely took them apart. Then the team analyzed each one to identify critical parameters such as the force of a feeder, then benchmarked its own products against these parameters. "The result was that we knew what our competitors were doing in terms of achieving their critical parameters," Elter said. "We were the best in some critical parameters but not all. No company is the best at everything. By knowing the best that can be achieved in each area, we can better work on meeting or exceeding these standards."

The product platform resulting from this project has generated a product category at Xerox called Document Centre; the first product in this line became available in April. The Document Centre category ultimately will comprise a number of modular, extensible, network-ready digital machines that can perform multiple tasks concurrently. For example, a unit might automatically scan in copies and send them electronically to a personal computer while it prints.

"So far, the results of this project have exceeded our expectations," Elter said. "We expect that from now on, we'll be able to start out of the box better on the first build and then come down the learning curve to improve our time to market. The early successes have confirmed this: We came out of the box almost two times as effectively as with any other program. Now, we plan to continue to use the tools and the cultural changes to maintain this trend."

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