Pratt & Whitney’s Lean Product Development Journey

Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corporation – UTC, is a world leader to design, manufacture, and service aircraft engines and auxiliary power units headquartered in East Hartford, Connecticut, USA.

Excellence is one of the seven Pratt & Whitney’s (P&W) core values. With the aim to continuously improve the company’s processes and ensure excellence is present in every product and service delivered to its customers, P&W applies lean thinking principles and other continuous improvement techniques in the product development process. Through its journey, the company has focused on deploying best practices such as Set Based Concurrent Engineering and Trade-off curves among others, aligning the product development ptocess to the company’s Achieving Competitive Excellence (ACE) Continuous Improvement vision.

By reading further, you will learn how Pratt & Whitney integrates lean to achieve business excellence and discover where to find more details about their Lean Product Development journey.

Pratt & Whitney was founded in Hartford, Connecticut, US in 1925 by Frederick Rentschler and since then it builds its business on the seven core values: Excellence, Innovation, Dependability, Adaptability, Customer service, Integrity, and Accountability.

Pratt & Whitney’s products are Engineered-to-Order (ETO), therefore the company focuses significant efforts on gathering and managing customer requirements’, ensuring they are well understood and clearly translated into the organizational language in order to design new products fully aligned to its customers’ expectations.

Pratt & Whitney (P&W) has been applying Lean principles and other continuous improvement methods for many years. Jim Womack visited one of the P&W manufacturing facilities and included the findings in his book “Lean Thinking”. All of these methods were captured in an all-encompassing system called “ACE” which stands for “Achieving Competitive Excellence” implemented in 2005. All P&W functions, from program management to manufacturing and the supply chain, use ACE and, therefore, apply Lean to their processes and value streams.

In 2009, Pratt & Whitney Engineering recognized the need to reduce the time spent on product development. Engineering assembled a small team to evaluate Ward’s Lean Product Development model, based on his four pillar model: Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE); Teams of Responsible Experts; Cadence, Pull and Flow; and the Entrepreneur System Designer.

Through its journey, Pratt & Whitney implemented several practices in their Lean Product Development process. These practices were identified and structured according to the four building blocks of the Lean Innovation Model proposed by the Lean Analytics Association as a generic framework to consolidate best practices across industries. The detailed explanation of each of the lean practices identified are available at Pratt & Whitney chapter in the Lean Product Development Best Practices Book. Below, just a few of the identified best practices are briefly described:

1) STRATEGY AND PERFORMANCE

Pratt & Whitney follows “Success Assured” vision that predicts more time spent on the early phases of product development with frequent integration events to focus on knowledge gap closure, coupled with continuous technology development and only starting detailed design when a high confidence “paper engine” is achieved.

2) SKILLED PEOPLE AND COLLABORATION

P&W invests heavily in developing its engineering competencies towards innovation. Their internal Engineering Technical University (ETU) selects and engages high profile employees to be trained through class lectures supported by on-the-job training and gamification techniques, where development is achieved through mentoring, coaching and supervision.

3) EFFICIENT PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT PROCESS AND KNOWLEDGE BASED ENVIRONMENT

Set-based concurrent engineering is an integral element of P&W’s product development process and is enabled by methods and techniques that help visualize the design space. Decision maps are used to identify the knowledge gap that can be filled with “Robust Design” methods to visualize and understand the design space as well as variation and uncertainty.

4) CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT AND CHANGE

P&W’s improvement process is enabled through the deployment of their “Achieving Competitive Excellence” system (ACE) common to all UTC subsidiaries, which was introduced in 2005 and has been followed ever since. The three elements of ACE are: tools, competency, and culture. It provides the foundation for delivering value to UTC customers and stakeholders.

Impact of applying Lean Thinking in Product Development

The company estimates that its component-level Design for Variation initiatives have yielded a 64% to 88% return on investment by reducing design iterations, improving manufacturability, increasing reliability, improving on-time deliveries and providing other performance benefits.

As Pratt & Whitney focuses increasingly on the systems level, it estimates that it will realize a 40-times return on investment by achieving systems-level reliability goals much earlier in the development cycle. An ultimate benefit is shortening the overall development cycle as reported from ANSYS Advantage Staff, in 2013.