Radical Productivity Improvement with One Pass to Production (OPP)

One pass to production (OPP) has the goal of reducing the product development time of cell phones from 2 years (in year 2001) to 1 day. In a culture that is geared to continuous improvement, this initiative for radical improvement is both a great opportunity and a challenge. We are in the fifth year of research collaboration of an 8 year project. Allied technologies and methodologies have continued to mature during this period, giving us a rare opportunity to pace our development process almost in synch. Balancing the long-term OPP objective with short term technology transfer to keep the project alive has been illuminating and productive. This paper will provide a technical overview of the OPP flow and briefly discuss the equally important issues of technology transfer and academic training.