🚗 Execution Constraint and Bottleneck: Lack of Robustness Thinking — Lessons from Autonomous Vehicle Development
Organizations today invest heavily in Quality, Reliability, Lean Six Sigma and Operational Excellence initiatives — streamlining processes, eliminating waste, and maximizing throughput.
These efforts are essential, but they often expose a deeper, less visible bottleneck:
👉 The lack of Robustness Thinking.
This topic recently motivated an engaging discussion at professional Reliability and PHM (Prognostics and Health Management) meetings, where many agreed that traditional approaches in Lean Six Sigma, Quality, and Reliability alone cannot ensure system excellence.
During the development of an autonomous driving vehicle, the engineering team mastered Lean execution.
Testing cycles were rapid. Hardware assembly was highly efficient.
Yet when prototypes hit real-world roads — heat, rain, vibration, electromagnetic interference — performance degraded.
Sensors drifted, algorithms struggled, and the system faltered under variability.
The team had optimized how value flowed, but not what flowed — the design’s ability to transform and manage energy and information robustly under unpredictable real-world conditions.
No amount of process efficiency could compensate for the lack of Functional Energy Flow integrity — the robustness of how energy and information traveled through the system.
💡 Robustness Thinking is the missing link.
It focuses on maximizing Functional Energy Flow — ensuring that systems transform and transmit energy efficiently and predictably across all conditions.
By integrating Robustness Thinking early in concept and detailed design, organizations can:
✅ Eliminate or reduce design-induced variation and early “birth defects.”
✅ Strengthen reliability, quality, and safety at the source.
✅ Empower Lean and Quality processes to operate at their full potential.
In short:
Lean makes the flow faster. Robustness makes the flow stronger.
Together, they remove execution bottlenecks and create sustainable performance.
To achieve Overall Flow — fast, stable, and reliable performance — organizations must evolve from Lean alone to Lean + Robustness Thinking, where efficiency meets resilience and systems achieve true excellence by design.
#EngineeringManagement #RobustDesign #Reliability #Quality #LeanThinking #OperationalExcellence #SystemsEngineering #ContinuousImprovement #AutonomousVehicles #IEEE #PHM #UniversityofHouston #LeanSixSigma #ASQ
Project Quality Engineer - TMC / Opmobility Alphatech
3wThank you for this opportunity to share my experiences!