As a Product Designer for Colour Televisions at Philips in Singapore, I reduced the lead-time by 50% by redesigning the product for “1st time right” with suppliers fully involved at start of project.
I challenged the traditional work-flow process, which was running sequentially, with buffers in between these processes. I studied the causes of delays, and made an overview best-in-class designs, aligning with production and quality departments. I then made standard design constructions together with key suppliers, to work in parallel, with daily and open communications.
This process was a huge success, with product lead times reduced by 50%, cheapest tooling, first-time-right with Quality, and smooth Production start-up.
This project gained recognition as new way of working, it was further adopted by numerous Philips organisations in other Business Units in Singapore, Netherlands and Belgium. As such, my career took start into the global Philips arena in 1991, with support from senior management in Eindhoven.

As European Program Manager for Indoor Lighting at Philips, I challenged the European R&D organisation, and lead the development of a new platform of lighting products with low power LEDs. This was cheaper, more suited to indoor lighting applications, and broke several internal records.
We worked together with R&D, Procurement, Production, Marketing and partner-suppliers.
We launched 13 families of products, within 9 months. This success was later repeated at China, India and US. This is now established LED platform in Philips, copied by many competitors and is now an industry standard for indoor lighting.
This platform is still generating very significant revenues from 2010 till today, 2020.

As a Product Designer for Picture Tubes (for colour televisions) at Philips in Eindhoven, I reduced the cost by 30% by redesigning the product for much higher manufacturing yields.
This was accomplished by working at production, to understand the root cause of the manufacturing problems. I then proceeded to develop and validate a set of Expert Rules for all the R&D groups to adopt for all new upcoming designs, in coming years.
I was leading the process, which was extended to global platforms, in Europe, Asia, US and Latin America, within 6 months. We were making huge savings, with direct impact on global price war.
I was awarded the “Innovation Award” for developing and leading this Transformation Process with R&D and Production teams, across several countries at Philips.

I was invited to support VDL. They had grown extremely rapidly and were struggling to keep up. Their product Lead Times and Manufacturing Costs were steadily escalating over the years.
I noticed immediately huge gaps and mis-alignment in mindsets across the organization. As they were accustomed to producing at high volume with low diversity, but lately shifting (very quickly) towards low volume with high diversity. Unconsciously, this developed into a steady trend of escalations and fire-fighting. I shared with management that Change Management was necessary.
I started by getting buy-in and collecting the real facts. I coached a team of engineers, from Bottom-Up of the organization, working on LEAN and Six Sigma methodology. They took turns to seek out, resolve and present the Root Cause Analysis with facts, in short Sprints every 4 weeks. This was well accepted by management, and the organization is now fully engaged into this process.
The problem was not technical but mindset. This was addressed with Trust, Respect, and facts.