Learning to Effort Ratio!

Within my previous blog titled ‘Tradeoff Curves’, I discussed the concept of tradeoff curves and how Toyota’s passion for extensive prototyping provides for redundancy which helps to plan a risk adverse system balanced with the infusion of new ideas. Let me discuss the concept a bit further by looking at the Learning to Effort ratio which quantifies the advantages of prototyping and having redundancies in your plan. Prototyping allows system designers to push the limits of testing proven subsystems (as far as required) to ensure that it works perfectly and also can meet changing system targets. The knowledge gained is not lost, but is banked for future projects.

Now trying to put things in perspective, lets consider a simple real life example of designing a house. Consider designing 4 houses. If you design using multiple choice alternatives for each component of the house, you'll end up with many more combination of designs than if you design using only a few concepts for each component. Thus using four interchangeable sets of each component, you could have 1024 unique house designs (theoretically at least!).



It also results in significant build up of knowledge which can be used for future design purposes. This is in comparison to just 4 unique houses you can design using only a few unique concepts. Another major advantage is that it also significantly improves the innovation to risk ratio i.e using the concept of interchangeable components, significantly improves the project success ratio.