This month, I wish to pay tribute to the memory of Dr. Don Clausing, who passed away in December 2010 in Waltham, Mass. Don made a major impact on engineering education at MIT and systems engineering best practices at ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) and INCOSE (International Council on Systems Engineering). He also had a profound, positive influence on my career. His intelligence, wit and humor will always be remembered by those who worked with him. He was one-of-a-kind.

Clausing Brings CPD&M to Kodak

I met and began working with Don in 1991, when he became a product development consultant at Eastman Kodak's Copier & Printer Division in Rochester, NY.  He introduced my colleagues and me to the concept of Critical Parameter Development and Management (CPD&M).  Starting with Don's mentoring, my own CPD&M skills matured significantly during my 18 years developing new technologies and designing and integrating new sub-systems into copier and printing products at Kodak.

In the late 1980's and early 1990's, the limited performance, excessive sensitivity and poor reliability of our copiers and printers were evidence that we lacked system knowledge about our products, especially under stressful conditions. We grew tired of the machines making us look like fools, not to mention the pressures from management to perform better during their development. The prevailing product development practice of "build-test-fix" seemed never-ending, wholly inadequate to the challenges we had, and did not produce sustainable results. It was high time for things to change. As Don loved to say, "Fortunately, that which cannot go on forever rarely does!"

We intuitively knew that we needed a better way to cope with the form-fit-function relationships across the complex system that forms as a new technology or product is developed, but did not know how to do it effectively. Our products relied on the physics of electrophotography, and those who try to define and control electrophotographic parameters may consider the practice a form of "black magic".  Of course we did understand many of the relationships that govern electrophotography, as well a number of other technologies used in printers such as fusing, paper handling, digital image processing and so on. No one person at Kodak understood all of it in a cohesive body of integrated knowledge. Our product was an integrated system of dozens of sub-systems, in-turn made up of many dozens of sub-assemblies and they, in-turn, comprised many thousands of parts and materials and lines of software code. We knew that not all of these items and relationships carried equal amounts of risk in their contribution to the product's functional performance, but how could we unlock that mystery? We continued to chase the ghosts in our machines, thinking "perfect" parts made "perfect" products.

My colleagues and I discovered the foundations of CPD&M in an article co-authored by Don, a former Xerox engineer and then at MIT (Hauser and Clausing, "The House of Quality," Harvard Business Review, May-June 1988). Here was an approach that showed promise! We hired Don as a consultant and worked intensively with him for almost 2 years.  During that time, we learned how to define, implement and document a method of building a comprehensive, relational, critical parameter data base.

(ed. note: for more about what CPD&M is, see newsletter of August 2008 and Chapter 8 of Design for Six Sigma in Technology & Product Development)

CPD&M Success with the Digimaster

In 1995, we finally had management support to implement CPD&M on an entirely new product, and in 1999 we launched the Digimaster, a digital printing system with a mature critical parameter data base that transferred into production along with the product. The Digimaster was the first system launched in 25 years that met its promised reliability goals while featuring industry-leading Six Sigma image quality (circa. 1999).  The application of CPD&M, together with contributions from our new Systems Engineering group, (which Don also told us we badly needed), more disciplined project management and an improved phase-gate process, made the positive difference in meeting our product development goals. But the Digimaster also proved that CPD&M pays off long after product development is over. The critical parameter data base enabled rapid diagnostics and problem-solving during production and servicing.

Seeing tangible success from the practice of CPD&M, I began teaching and practicing a more holistic form of it with the rest of my colleagues at Kodak, which has led to my current consulting practice at PDSS Inc. It was the most enlightening and fulfilling experience in my career as a technology, product development and production support engineer.

Without people like Don Clausing, we would still be struggling with the paradigm of "just make your parts to spec and the product will be fine". That, we now know, is simply not the case. When the going gets tough during development - never give up. Stick with your CPD&M discipline and you will learn the truth. Then you can make the right technical decisions for your business or enterprise. Don was fearless about promoting these methods and telling the truth. I will always be grateful to Don for what he taught me and will carry on his teaching until the Law of Entropy returns my energy to the universal pool.