This volume explores 12 management practices that are revolutionizing the way products are now being developed in discrete manufacturing companies in Japan, North America and Europe. Each is documented, provable and repeatable. The book documents seven years of benchmarking best practices, drawn from 60 of the leanest, most flexible and most robust companies in the world. It identifies an effective new style of management that merges total quality, concurrent engineering and process re-engineering practices, and provides a complete plan for improving product development, including how to: execute the concept of holistic management of complex systems; replicate best practices in product development applied in world-class companies; manage product development as a strategic process; and implement ideas that can lead to improvements consistently. Dan Dimanescu is the author of The Seamless Enterprise.