I got to thinking about lean product design the other night as I watched a commercial for milk chocolate-covered Oreos. When I was growing up, the Oreo section of the cookie isle presented a fairly simple choice – regular or Double Stuff. Back then, Nabisco probably didn’t dedicate much R&D to the Oreo line – why fix something that wasn’t broken?

Well, to today’s kids, everything is broken. Why have two varieties of Oreo when they can have 20? Supermarket shelves now feature a couple of milk chocolate-covered varieties, golden Oreos, bite-sized offerings, white fudge-covered Oreos, go-packs, and so on. Succor for kids with ADD of the stomach.

For Nabisco, that means a lot more risk (in launching new products) and volatility (in kids’ fickle demand for some or all of those products). The company must invest gobs of money in R&D, launch new products quickly, and hope they don’t tank. All of which justifies a lean approach to product design that unifies design engineering with the production planning on the factory floor.  

In the words of Technology Perspectives, an educational and training organization focused on lean design, “if a ‘fat’ product is handed off to the factory, all the lean manufacturing in the world won’t get all of the waste out.”

OK, so maybe Oreos aren’t the best example to use in this case. The biggest payoff for lean design will be on products that are highly engineered and demand complex production tasks. But even on the smaller scale of Oreos, designing a product for seamless manufacturing and packaging can be crucial in terms of saving time and keeping costs down.

This kind of forethought lies at the heart of the Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) concept, whose champion, Boothroyd Dewhurst Inc., holds an annual conference dedicated to its tenets.

A press release following this year’s conference featured these words of wisdom: “If you don’t spend the time early, it comes back at you later in the form of design changes you could have avoided.”

In other words, get that Oreo right, or it’ll come back to bite you.

And now I need a snack.

Here are some additional resources on product design that may be helpful:

The Institute for Lean Innovation http://www.leaninnovationleadership.com/

A presentation on innovation from Lisa Bodell of futurethink at this month’s Progressive Manufacturing Summit.