David Troness has 30 years of experience in New Product Development (NPD), mainly focused on advancements in Design for Reliability, Critical Root Cause Analysis, and driving for elegant solutions to seemingly impossible problems. He also uses some of the latest tools, strategies, and approaches, from current thought leaders in this area.
He takes companies beyond brainstorming, beyond regular Root Cause Analysis (RCA), beyond failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), beyond common approaches to preventative maintenance optimization, beyond Voice of the Customer (VOC), beyond Pugh Concept Selection Matrices, and beyond expensive/complex solutions to tough problems. This is all with the goal of achieving large improvements, instead of incremental improvement.
He has worked with Intel, Honeywell Aerospace, Ford Motor Company, as well as smaller companies in food, coatings, medical instruments, energy, consumer products and alternative energy, as well from teaching at Arizona State University.
Specific examples of his consulting work include:
- Led the use of “Physics-Based Causal Analysis” to understand all possible causes of proposed new fuel pump – saved $10M
- Reduced cost of testing new products and subsystems by 70%
- Resolved reliability issues with new products, by simplifying/eliminating manufacturing process steps, instead of increasing cost
- Coached 800+ senior NPD engineers, managers, and technical leaders in advanced causal analysis and solution development
- $20M+ in cost avoidance from simplifying jet engine subsystems and eliminating costly warranty issues
- Introduced/taught/coached engineers at 10 Intel manufacturing sites in TRIZ methods resulting in over $200M in savings/improvements
- Introduced predictive maintenance technologies to manage potential failures in new products, resulting in $10M savings
- Created manufacturing equipment reliability program which was proliferated across all of Ford’s North American Operations
- Increased output of new capital equipment in several factories, typically by 10-25%
- Drove the rigorous specification of performance goals, based on system modeling, Markov models, discrete-event simulation
Introduced senior management to the newest NPD strategies from current thought leaders.
- Brought science of human motivation and behavior, to guide new product operation, performance, and safety
- Developed competitive warranty strategy for new alternative energy product while still limiting the potential “cost of warranty”
- Delivered training/tools for apportioning requirements of the subsystems & components to support system requirements
- Established standards and guidelines for measuring & analyzing data for new product performance
- Drove teams to use Weibull Analysis to understand probabilities of failures, instead of averages, mean time between failure (MTBF), etc.
- Used Weibull Analysis to understand underlying physics of failures, and drive optimization of Preventive Maintenance frequency
- Used more powerful, advanced tools to go beyond root cause analysis (RCA), failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), fault tree analysis (FTA), etc., with better depth & breadth, no brainstorming or guessing
- Utilized statistically-valid testing strategies for verifying/demonstrating new products/improvements meet performance goals
- Moved computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) data from simple events, to tracking individual failure modes, making data much more useful for improvement
- Led team to solve problems through simplification using Function Analysis and TRIZ
David is certified in Reliability Engineering, Six Sigma, Lean, and TRIZ. He has written papers on TRIZ, Physics-Based Causal Analysis, Weibull Analysis, Reliability Engineering, and other topics.