Bonsai Process Development

Increasing speed to market is a key to maximizing profitability in launching new technology and products. The Process Development team tasked with developing the new process technology has the challenge of managing the triple constraint; that being time, scope, and resources. There is an ever increasing drive to go faster with fewer resources. So that leaves the team with how to manage the scope of developing the new process technology. Process Development is all about making decisions. The method I will discuss I call “Bonsai Process Development”. The Bonsai Tree gardener carefully prunes the branches of the Bonsai tree in order to train the tree in the direction they desire. Here the analogy is that the “trunk” represents the exact commercial process, while the “branches” are nodes where two or more options are considered. Only one of these alternatives will become part of the final process. It is at these nodes where time and effort can be either expended or conserved by how we approach decision making. In the strictest sense any work or time spent on an alternate branch represents waste. Realistically, some work needs to be done on the alternatives to make the right choice. However, delaying decision making and working on the alternate branch too long is wasteful and can cause delays to the project, so the process developer needs to learn to prune these branches. The better we can frame up the problem statement or objective of the process step, define success and what is necessary for success, including rate limiting activities, the quicker we can get to the final commercial process. Approaches and examples will be used to illustrate the Bonsai Process Development principles.