Quantum Leap Methodology

• Reduce Time-To-Market
• Outpace Your Competition
• Increase Your Profitability

For 20 years Kalman Saffran Associates (KSA) has used and refined a methodology that enabled it to develop advanced products for industry leading "Fortune 100"  companies significantly faster than they could themselves.  Now this methodology is being offered for sale.  By showing our customers how to develop more rapidly, and produce more innovative and customer-responsive products, KSA has demonstrated the competitive advantages of its revolutionary and easily implemented proprietary product development system. 

Since the lifeblood of virtually every high-tech company today is new product development, true market leaders are those who consistently introduce new product advances at a rapid pace, and keep them coming.  When approached scientifically, this can even be done within significantly shorter product development-to-market cycles.  Perform this feat again and again and your company breaks away from the pack, opening up a long, powerful lead and greatly expanding overall company value.

The methodology that will help a company achieve all this represents a quantum leap in terms of both process and results.  KSA's Quantum Leap Methodology (QLM) system, offering a remarkable set of processes, techniques, forms and other implementation aids we've been testing and developing in the marketplace with some of America's leading high-technology companies, provides just such a breakthrough approach. 

Formula for Market Leadership - 
Quantum Leap Methodology (QLM)

Based upon fundamental concepts such as consistency, correctness, precision, predictability, verification and repeatability, the QLM business-based approach, when applied to financial, schedule, and product considerations, achieves the optimal combination of budget, timeframe and product innovation a company desires.  KSA invented this world-class product development system by observing and fully integrating and extending the best practices of the most successful companies as well as introducing several of its own new and innovative ground-breaking processes.  As a result, KSA's clients now enjoy significant advantages over companies using traditional product development methodologies, including:

1.  Financial Benefits of QLM:

• Additional revenues / profits as a result of getting to market faster
• Reduced product development costs by as much as 50%
• Revenue / profit increases due to heightened market position and longer product life cycles
• Ability to charge higher prices due to increased market leadership
• Higher return within a shorter payback period (ROI can be in thousands of percent, payback in less than a year)

• Results are assured because QLM is proven 
• Effects can be seen almost immediately because QLM is fast
• Products developed through QLM have a major effect on a company because QLM's results are high impact
• QLM is easy to deploy (via frameworks, checklists, and templates)
• QLM is easy to control
• QLM is easy to understand

• Reduce the product development component of your time-to-market by as much as one-half
• Free up personnel for other projects by reducing the effort and associated personnel requirements on any given project 
• Increase product quality
• Eliminate major development iterations due to defects

What is QLM?

QLM is a complete lifecycle system for product development.  It addresses all phases of the lifecycle from product concept to turnover to manufacturing.  The QLM system address project planning, estimating and management, staffing / resource planning, and financial planning and control as well as product development.

Who is KSA?   Why are we different from other companies?

Over the past 20 years KSA has undertaken over 3000 projects (primarily in new product development) for over 50 mostly "Fortune 100" companies in both high tech (such as telecom, datacom, CATV, computers) and other industries (medical, financial services, insurance, banking).  As a consequence of our QLM procedures and implementation aids, our client companies benefit from our involvement because we: 

• Identify a company's outmoded product development assumptions and procedures via our comprehensive review of existing product development processes
• Expedite product development and deployment with our seasoned, objective third party partner analyses
• Reduce the critical path interval when our clients use us for outsourcing· 
• Enhance consistency and effectiveness companywide by deploying QLM across all departments
• Customize internal product development processes by tailoring QLM to specified areas, e.g., systems engineering, specifications, verification, etc.
• Keep corporate and business units at the highest levels up-to-date on product development progress and needs with our delivery of ongoing presentations and reports

QLM system coverage begins with the concept/feasibility phase of the product development lifecycle and continues right through the handoff to manufacturing. Specifically QLM covers:

1)   Project lifecycle / management including:

• Project analysis (alternatives, tradeoff) and 
• Project planning (specification or requirements document, estimates, schedule, roles and responsibilities, resources, project control, remedial action)

• Everything from  conceptualization and feasibility through specifications, architecture and interfaces, detailed design, design verification, integration, testing, manufacturing and support

QLM Concepts and Implementation Aids

Guiding QLM are powerful methodology concepts and implementation aids that other product development systems typically ignore, such as:

Concepts:

• The Law of Consistency, i.e., the accuracy and precision of the output can be no greater than the accuracy and precision put in
• The Law of "Greatly Diminishing Returns," i.e., always execute in strict priority order - or you will obtain less--than--optimal results
• Remembering to design quality in rather than test it out
• Design for testability - throughout and from the beginning
• Define the problem fully at the beginning - this typically gets you halfway to a solution before you even begin!
• Constant analysis of alternatives and trade-offs across technical, schedule and financial domains 
• "Zero" defects at system integration time - root out problems early 
• Simplify, simplify, simplify! - don't overlook simple solutions; they are often the best
• Always start verification on Day One - everything requires verification
• "Make vs. Buy" Analysis - make objective decisions unclouded by the Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome
• Involve the customer in all major decisions/reviews
• Strive for maximum efficiency (no false starts, no digressions, no iterations)
• Phase everything - allows complex problems to become manageable
• Don't serialize - parallelize! - pipeline tasks to minimize overall duration - remove dependencies

• QLM's comprehensive, integrated methodology with stratified, easy to follow checklists / templates (others use more scattered approaches)
• Estimates based on factual, complete and accurate data collection / analysis, rather than natural, though typically inaccurate human optimism 
• Increased attention paid to front end of the development process (others typically emphasize more attention paid to the back end)
• The most thorough specifications procedures result in fewest design iterations and customer disappointments 
• Effective staffing procedures ensure a correct task/skill match-up
• Critical path methodology (most companies ignore this altogether)
• Closed-loop approach (most companies employ open-loop techniques) - feedback is essential to prevent runaway conditions
• Unsurpassed verification procedures (this is a key QLM strength)

KSA's Quantum Leap Methodology enables our clients to compete more effectively and run more efficient and profitable businesses.  It is based on viewing multi-dimensional business problems in a scientific, analytical context.  It is straightforward to implement.  Once applied to financial, schedule, and product considerations, QLM achieves an optimal combination of budget, schedule and product attributes for our client companies.

Pricing for QLM begins at $25,000.  Programs are custom tailored to the needs of each company.

KSA's QLM thus creates breakthrough product development results faster, via methods that are less costly, of consistently higher quality and which can be replicated.  We move a company higher in its market position and keep it up there, producing, as a result, larger profit margins that themselves continue to climb.

Let KSA show you how QLM will produce similar results for your company and catapult it into market leadership for the long haul.  Call us today for a complimentary appraisal and more details.