Nowhere in a company is the need for coordination more acute than between the people who are responsible for product design and those responsible for manufacturing. As Daniel E. Whitney argued in these pages recently (“Manufacturing by Design,” July–August 1988), most companies have operated for years in an environment where design and manufacturing communicate infrequently, if at all. In the worst instances, product designs were just thrown “over the wall”: designers felt that their job was finished when designs were released and disappeared into manufacturing’s domain; manufacturing engineers struggled to build products that were dropped in their laps.
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 1989 issue of Harvard Business Review.
