St. Louis, MO – Watlow , an industry leader in the design and manufacture of complete thermal systems, announced that its vice president of product engineering contributed to a case study that is featured in a new book titled, The Mastery of Innovation: A Field Guide to Lean Product Development by Katherine Radeka.
The case history highlights Watlow’s implementation of lean product development practices. Chris Lanham, Watlow’s vice president of product engineering, described Watlow’s goal of increasing market growth, within a specific time frame, to a rate unprecedented in the company’s 90-year history. Watlow developed a portfolio management process to balance its capacity with opportunity for creation of new value across its target markets, and the result was a significant increase in sales and active development projects.
“We are honored to be a contributor to a book describing the successes of lean product development,” said Lanham. “We are in our eighth year of our lean transformation and are proud to share our results. We have witnessed first-hand how lean ideas work and we encourage other companies to employ lean practices.”
The Mastery of Innovation: A Field Guide to Lean Product Development describes the experiences of 19 companies that have achieved significant results from lean product development. All of the companies featured in the book needed to accelerate time-to-market, get more new products to customers and improve ROI from investments in R&D. By adapting lean ideas to their specific product development challenges, they learned how to focus innovation on the problems that would maximize customer and business value and deliver on their best ideas.