Speeding Up New-Product Development
Various companies organize their new-product development procedure into the orderly sequence of steps starting having idea generation and ending with commercialization. Under this sequential product development scheme, one company department works separately to complete its stage of the procedure before passing the new product along to the next stage and department. Orderly, step-by-step procedure can help bring control to complex and risky projects. But it also may be dangerously slow. In fast-changing, greatly competitive markets, like slow-but-sure product development may result in product failures, lost sales and crumbling market positions and profits. "Speed to market" and reducing new-product development cycle time have become pressing concerns to companies in all of industries.
To get their new products to market more rapidly, many companies are adopting a faster, team-oriented schema called simultaneous (or team-based) product development. Under this approach, company departments work strongly together, overlapping the steps in the product development procedure to save time and increase effectiveness. Rather of passing the new product from department to department, the company assembles a team of people from many departments that stay with a new product from begins to finish. Such teams typically include people from the marketing, finance, manufacturing, design and legal departments, and even supplier and customer companies.
Top management provides the product development team common strategic direction but no clear-cut product idea or work plan. It challenges the team along stiff and seemingly contradictory goals- "turn out carefully planned & superior new products, but do it quickly"-and then provides the team whatever freedom and resources it require to meet the challenge. In the sequential procedure, a bottleneck at one phase may seriously slow the whole project. In the concurrent approach, if one functional area hits snags, it works to resolve them as the team moves on.