Month: November 2018

Global manufacturer Dormer Pramet tasks its product management and development department with creating new tools every year. One member of the team is product and development engineer Jan Bittner. In January 2015, Bittner joined Dormer Pramet and became part of the company’s project to develop an assortment of high feed milling tools. Almost three years later, a new range of SBN10 cutters and BNGX inserts were launched into the global market. The time taken to introduce a product is an indication of the investment a manufacturer makes to create a new product which will add value to customers for many years. At Dormer Pramet, the process of creating a new tool begins with its product management department, which identifies the market needs and gaps in the company’s current assortment. Karel Tiefenbach is the company’s Product Manager for indexable milling and he created a concept brief and clear objective for the development team. Dormer Pramet’s aim was to create an assortment of tools for its double-negative cutters, which allowed high…

I wonder how many readers of this article have ever been part of a high-performance team? I suspect many may well have been part of a team that produced great results, or a team whose members enjoyed working with one another, or perhaps one in which the team felt that they were engaged in something really worthwhile, but these things alone do not constitute a high-performance team. Sure, they can be indicators of great performance but participation on a high-performance team is a rare and very special experience. Over the decades I have worked in various different teams across a range of industries and organisations and have been privileged to have been part of what I consider a “high-performance team” on just three occasions. Although each team operated in quite diverse domains, with different objectives and unique team members, the common, consistent element between each team was a feeling of effortlessness and invincibility – stretch goals and outcomes were achieved…