You're facing a stagnant manufacturing process. How can you infuse design thinking for innovation?

Stagnant manufacturing process typically happen with these symptoms: 1. Poor efficiencies - lots of waste, delay 2. Higher costs - low production, low productivity, manual heavy 3. Quality issues - constant errors, poor corrective measures, rejected by exporters 4. Reduced competitiveness - unable to customize, lack adaptation, high product returns These problems can be further deep dive with Empathy session. Design a session where people from manufacturing & production can hash out their issues. Facilitated session can help manage poor responses. No solutions should be discussed here. Problems Day!

Design Thinking (DT) é uma abordagem para a inovação centrada no ser humano. O DT possui três pilares, são eles: Empatia, Colaboração e Experimentação. Tais pilares levam em consideração três aspectos: Soluções desejáveis (demanda/usuário), Soluções praticáveis (tecnologia/processos) e Soluções viáveis (recursos/negócios).

Clearly identify and articulate the specific issues hindering progress. Gather data through observations, interviews, and feedback from all stakeholders, including employees, suppliers, and customers. Analyze this information to pinpoint root causes and understand the broader context. Break down complex problems into manageable parts to tackle them systematically. By defining challenges accurately, you create a focused foundation for ideating solutions, prototyping, and implementing effective changes, driving innovation in the manufacturing process.

defined the challenges and ideated potential solutions, create simple, low-cost prototypes to test your ideas. Focus on developing basic versions of the solutions that can be rapidly built and evaluated. Engage with stakeholders, including employees and customers, to gather feedback on these prototypes. Use this feedback to refine and improve your concepts iteratively. Quick prototyping allows you to identify viable solutions faster, reduce risks, and accelerate the innovation process, ultimately leading to more effective and efficient manufacturing improvements.

Consider involving cross-functional teams early in the implementation phase. By bringing diverse perspectives from various departments, you can uncover potential obstacles and solutions that may not be immediately apparent. This approach not only fosters innovation but also ensures a more comprehensive and smooth implementation process.

Invest in employee engagement. Its one of the overlooked areas in Innovation. You can take a pause to glorify innovation, as more often than not it comes from ordinary people serving their functions well. Manufacturing and production lines can attest to this, when we listen more, better innovations come out to play. Enable a good platform, that starts internally with small wins. Glorify them too, and that will pave the way for trust and better ideas.

Idris Mootee definiu o DT como um equilíbrio entre negócio e arte, estrutura e caos, intuição e lógica, conceito e execução, ludicidade e formalidade, controle e empoderamento. De acordo com Christensen, o DT pode ser adotado em todos os níveis de uma organização para ajudar a construir produtos e sistemas inovadores, e para melhorar a experiência dos clientes. Para Fraser, DT é o reenquadramento de oportunidades em um sentido estratégico.