There are a few established models of the new product development process known to the manufacturing industry, such as the IDEO process, the Booz, Allen, and Hamilton (BAH) model, and the Phase-Gate model. Despite their varying levels of utility and success for different companies, all those models essentially refer to similar steps of progression in the development of a new product, including:
- Identification of problems: the first step of every innovation is to figure out the unaddressed issues/difficulties customers have. The ultimate goal of the new product is to solve those problems.
- Ideation: once the problems have been identified, the development team can brainstorm solutions and ideas. Design requirements and constraints must be taken into account.
- Concept generation: pick two or three of the most technically viable solutions from the available ideas. Sketch each design for a more thorough evaluation, and then choose a single best concept to build as a prototype.
- Prototyping: the manufacturing process of a product prototype.
- Test: evaluate the prototype through a rigorous series of tests. Make proper documentation to summarize both the upsides and downsides revealed during the evaluation.
- Improvement: address the downsides based on the data compiled during the test phase. Identify all the proposed changes and validate the revision. If need be, repeat phases 1 to 6 multiple times until the product meets the initial design plan.
- Launch: the product is ready to launch.
A well-thought-out product development plan helps you organize the research, understand customers’ expectations, and make an accurate estimation of the required resources. Every phase in the progression prevents you from wasting time and money.
New Product development timeline
A typical product development timeline does not exist. It depends on many factors, most importantly, the complexity of the product in question and the resources available at your disposal. A simple project, like a variation of an existing product, may take anywhere between two to four months; on the other hand, a sophisticated brand-new design can take two years or more to complete. Certain phases in the development of the model can be unpredictable, as in, you cannot predict how long the tasks will take.
For instance, the test and improvement phases may take a week, a month, six months, a year, or maybe more, depending on what the evaluation reveals. The whole point of an evaluation is to validate the design and discover unexpected flaws. Accordingly, the improvement phase should run for as long as it takes to address all the faults encountered during the evaluation. With that in mind, the clever thing to do is to overestimate the timeline; it is better to finish early than to race against delay.
Regardless of the timeline you set, it is best to avoid being overly confident with it. Implement weekly deadlines to mark every achievement or progress. Tight deadlines aimed at small milestones provide an atmosphere of urgency to the development team without inducing panic. They also give a rewarding sense of accomplishment each time the project takes a step forward. Tight deadlines are most useful during the ideation phase. Without tight deadlines, the team may be tempted to spend too much time on brainstorming solutions, which in the long run will hurt the overall project timeline as it enters further development phases.
A project that languishes on concept generation also has an immense potential to wreak havoc on progress. The team uses a large portion of the timeline dealing with theoretical products, leaving little else for testing and improvement. Having a clear project timeline allows you to keep track of advances. You will also notice when a project reaches a point where meeting the development expectations is no longer possible. In that case, it is time to pull the plug and build something else.
Improving the timeline
It is good to be able to stay on schedule in every phase of product development, but there are things you can do to speed up progress.
1) Focus on the big unknowns first
Big unknowns might be longstanding engineering issues, unfamiliar manufacturing processes, testers’ qualifications, or gap analysis. They are like invisible elephants in the room, the high-risk parts of the project that need immediate attention before the first phase of product development even starts. Every task (related to the development process) that you cannot comfortably categorize under any of the phases must be considered an unknown; a more efficacious task is a bigger unknown. Tackle these issues first, otherwise, they will linger on and surprise you later.
2) Start with the right teams
To deal with the big unknowns, the development team likely involves people across multiple departments. Design and Engineering departments are the obvious members. Depending on the efficaciousness of the problems, however, there can be decision-making personnel from R&D, Finance, IT, Manufacturing, Marketing, Quality, Product Management, and Human Resources departments. Each member of the team may not be an indispensable person in the design process, but every input plays a role in easing the hassles.
Assembling a complete team early on has a massive advantage in coordinating affairs. They engage in an open discussion, not to brainstorm solutions or present concepts, but to define the most effective ways to improve communication and teamwork throughout the upcoming product development project. The discussion should determine who does what, how everything should be done, and where to complain when something goes wrong. The procedures for making, testing, and launching also are made clear here.
If your company doesn’t have prototyping or manufacturing capability, pick a dependable external firm and establish the partnership early on. The firm must be on the team from the get-go together with all the involved departments. During the initial discussion, ensuring that all parties accept the rules, procedures, and plan of action is imperative.
3) Development process management
Everyone says that implementing proper process management speeds up progress and generally doesn’t do any harm to anything; by doing things in the right way, you make everything better than it already is. In a new product development project, the prerequisite of effective process management includes an impeccable understanding of the design approach implemented, manufacturing operation, workload fluctuation, and the availability of resources at any given time. Those variables must work in a streamlined system to ensure that the product development process can avoid hindrances and eliminate bottlenecks.
If you are a manager who oversees new product development, it is your responsibility to know how many projects the team can handle and how quickly they can launch new products to market. Unless you are directly involved in every phase of progression, a new product development might look like nothing more than just another project in the list from your perspective. In reality, such a project is a complex undertaking of its own with pre-determined, if not limited, resources. Process management requires the manager to, as the term implies, manage the process.
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Many managers would disagree because a new product development calls for creativity, and meticulous managing the process can turn into an obstacle instead. Product development almost always comes with unique challenges that also require out-of-the-box solutions. There is a valid point in that argument, although you must realize that most tasks in the project are not unique at all.
Many things are pretty repetitive, such as ensuring resources availability, workload supervision, and documentation. Process management presides over the typical managerial concerns to encourage continuous improvement—without hindering creativity. Some aspects of a new product development process that a manager should focus on may include:
One team for one project
The implementation of process management to product development is now a common practice thanks to big companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Ford, General Motors, and Harley-Davidson, which started to implement the approach more than 30 years ago. They already knew it was the right thing to do to speed up progress in product development when most other companies were still reluctant to mingle creativity-demanding innovation with by-the-book managerial matters. What those companies discovered from the experiment was relatively unsurprising:
- Product development projects require a shorter timeline if a company doesn’t overwhelm its resources.
- Investments to minimize bottlenecks yield extensive improvement in a product’s timeline-to-market.
- Reduced workload variation means fewer delays and distractions.
Process management in product development attempts to relieve the company from major obstacles that may interfere with creative tasks. It is an effective way to eliminate the kind of congestion typically observed in a company that undertakes multiple development projects at a time.
In most companies, product development is handled by a team of designers working in tandem with an engineering department. The problem is that when multiple projects run at the same time, all design teams have to rely on the same group of engineers. From a typical managerial point of view, the engineers play a cross-functional, concurrent role to solve problems as quickly as possible. Since the product from every team is unique, the engineers face an unavoidable workload variation.
Each product carries its own puzzle, which requires different levels of problem-solving skills and decision-making processes. A host of factors such as deadline, complexity, and objectives demand a unique engineering approach as well. When product engineers have to solve problems from two or three product concepts with varying degrees of difficulty, a backlog is almost a certainty. To make things worse, people from the manufacturing and IT departments deal with the same situation. A delay in one project causes another delay in another project. A good solution is to assign one specific product development to one complete yet diverse team.
One project at a time
Some manufacturers go beyond creating a cross-functional team by adding an aggregate plan for all development projects. The idea is to rank the projects by their strategic importance. An innovative product takes the first rank and is the priority, while a derivative or variation of an existing one comes second. Other minor projects have a lower degree of importance. The rank also indicates the number of resources the company should provide for each project; the highest priority development receives the most of whatever the company can spare.
Despite the organizational system, some projects may still run behind schedule. The most likely reason is that all the projects, priority and otherwise, run simultaneously under the supervision of the same cross-functional engineers. Every project has its own deadline regardless of rank, so the engineers along with the technicians who support the workload still have to perform critical tests for all the proposed products. In the absence of additional investment in equipment or employees, long backlogs are inevitable.
An aggregate plan is a good idea as a tool to separate marginal projects from the development of the company’s main products. The problem is not about the plan or the rank system but the number of projects in the plan. A cross-functional team may even be an effective solution as long as it doesn’t have to take on more projects than it can handle. One project at a time is best in most cases; there is no sharing of resources, causing massive congestion in every phase of development.
Duplicating resources
The sharing of resources is brilliant from managerial and financial perspectives. Whether or not this is good for improving the product development timeline is a different matter. Some companies take the right step to accelerate a product’s timeline-to-market by relying on a dedicated project team. To avoid any delay, the team has the power and authority to work in an autonomous manner. The company allows the team to utilize every available resource as they see fit. Nothing about this system indicates anything about sharing.
For two or more separate projects, the company has to duplicate resources instead of sharing them. There must be more than one of the same equipment, budget allocation, and qualified engineer and tester. It is an effective method but an expensive endeavor. If duplicating resources is not financially viable, all concurrent projects cannot be resource-demanding.
For example, they aim to be simple variations of the same existing product, so they are technically identical but with minor differences such as in appearance, packaging, flavor (in food & beverage products), colors, or additional elements that do not affect the core product values. Duplicating the resources is therefore unnecessary if sharing does not overwhelm them.
4) Recognize design constraints
No matter what kind of product you are about to develop, whether simple fashion accessories or sophisticated cars, there are bound to be some factors that limit creativity. These factors are known as design constraints, such as:
- Financial constraints: budget limitation dictates that you cannot design a product the company cannot afford to develop. If there is not enough money to hire qualified engineers and buy the necessary equipment, design a simpler product.
- Compliance constraints: there can be laws and regulations the product must adhere to: for example, a road-legal car needs to meet emission standards and have reasonable ground clearance.
- Skill level constraints: the product is only as good as the people who design it. In general, more experienced designers make better products than their inexperienced counterparts.
- Stylistic constraints: the need to follow aesthetic trademarks or brand style can be a limiting factor too. Some companies want new products that do not deviate too far from the previous design.
Design constraints may seem to limit the development team’s ability to make the best possible product. In many cases, this is true. For example, a car designer can probably develop an actual Transformers-like vehicle if budget is not an issue. In the more favorable point of view, however, design constraints are not entirely a bad thing because they encourage designers to be even more creative at finding solutions. They must use resources in the most efficient way to meet the pre-determined design criteria.
Understanding the design constraints forces the development team to work within the boundaries of what is possible and allowed. As a result, the team avoids the reckless mistake of creating a product concept that is impossible to build with the given limitations. Without clearly defined constraints, the development process can spend too much time stuck in ideation and concept generation phases.
5) Multiple, parallel processes
During the time a design team is developing a concept, another group can simultaneously run an introductory marketing campaign of a product. Given enough resources, there might even be yet another separate team for the packaging design. It is one project divided into multiple, parallel processes. The only way it can work is to ensure that all those separate teams understand the design requirements and constraints. As the teams work on their respective parts of the same project, the product’s timeline-to-market compresses a great deal.
6) Rapid prototyping
A prototype can be either a fully functional early model of a product or a physical representation of what it should look like in the final version. Rapid prototyping is used mainly for the latter. It works by using a computer-generated 3D model of the product, then printing it into a physical object. The materials (filaments) for the printing process are plastic. Also known as additive manufacturing, 3D printing uses plastic to build a physical object layer by layer. First, you make the 3D model using computer-aided design (CAD) software in a printable format. Next, a 3D printer analyzes the object and extrudes the filament into a printing bed through a nozzle.
If your product is entirely made of plastic with little mechanical movement inside, chances are you can make a working prototype using nothing else but a 3D printer. For a product that is supposed to be made of metal, wood, glass, or any combination of those, and with plenty of moving parts inside, 3D printing is still useful for building a preliminary prototype.
In any case, rapid prototyping gives a glimpse of the dimension, specification, and aesthetic aspects of a product concept. It is part of a design validation procedure to determine whether or not the idea should go to the next phase of development. It is quicker, accurate, and more affordable than an injection molding or CNC method.
Take your time
It may sound counter-productive, but an excellent way to improve a product’s timeline-to-market is to take your time crafting a careful plan for the venture. For sure, you have no time to waste, but a proper analysis of company resources, workload variation, project prioritization, team capability, and process management will save you from headaches when development is underway.
How Cad Crowd can help
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