2006 MVP Award Winner

CONGRATULATIONS to Kenneth J. Brown, Senior Manager, Design Assurance, Interventional Cardiology Division at Boston Scientific Corporation, the overall winner of Management Roundtable’s second annual Product Development and R&D MVP Award!

Read Ken Brown's Interview on FastTrack

Accomplishments

Boston Scientific Corporation (BSC) has turned to Lean to help reduce product development investment while managing risk and market requirements. The company has achieved marked success applying its principles to team performance and has achieved improvements across the dimensions of cost, schedule and performance. Ken Brown has led specific implementation efforts in many areas of BSC's LEAN Product Development initiative. Some examples of these efforts include being the primary driver on the company’s real-time aging initiative, creating a statistical normality screening tool, and serving as the co-leader on the process validation procedure changes for validating line extensions.

Impact

Ken’s successful Lean Product Development Process (PDP) leadership helped convince BSC senior management to revise the policy for defining real-time aged products – a change which will result in millions of dollars of cost avoidance by preventing the need for thousands of additional product builds for shelf life testing. As part of Lean PDP, all of Brown’s projects targeted either outright project cost reduction and/or project cost avoidance through anticipated labor, cycle time, and/or material inventory reductions.

Biggest Success

In his own words, Ken feels his biggest success was “turning hard skeptics into advocates on the Lean Normality Screening project. Both the corporate and site level statisticians were initially opposed to my normality screening approach. I worked diligently to strengthen those relationships and move them to the point where they were willing to pilot the approach. Six months later they have both embraced the approach and are now working to make it available corporate wide.”

Methodology and Lessons Learned

Project teams must report to the Project Investment Board (PIB), which is a steering committee of twenty senior cross-functional leaders charged with monitoring, approving, and/or canceling projects based on the metrics and presentations by each team’s core team leader. Each project operates under an approved PIB contract to deliver a specific product that meets specified performance requirements, timeline, and cost. Each month the PIB reviews various metrics that include six Lean PDP scoreboard metrics. Other metrics include launches by region, project impact (anticipated revenue, ROI, etc.), actual versus planned spending, spending versus worldwide sales, project spend distribution (labor, inventory, T&E, etc.), and PDP spend by development phase, time-to-market, and milestones.

Key lessons included the need for consensus building.

Influence

Phil Ebeling, Director of Program Management, Boston Scientific Corporation, commented, “Over the years Ken has made significant contributions on a number of key product development related activities at Boston Scientific. His contributions have been instrumental to our impressive position in lean product development.”