Reducing time to market is critically important for most every organization.
As a result, finding ways to speed the innovation and product development processes are not only strategic, but paramount for success.
The product development process is complex for many reasons:
- Different functions are involved: Marketing, R&D, Engineering, Sales, Quality, and Manufacturing. Each function has its own agenda and priorities, and is typically working within its own silo.
- Customers are often absent of the process, or involved only at a very late stage.
- Flow is only apparent on a higher abstract level.
- Activities are managed sequentially leaving the potential for design problems to be discovered very late in the development process.
- Late stage changes occur often creating extra complexity and sometimes requiring a new development effort.
- Resource allocation is not clear and projects often lack dedicated resources.
- Product Development portfolios are large and priorities are not always clear.
- The product development process is not managed in a disciplined way.
These complexities result in extra work, delays and defects that create long-lead times thus increasing time to market.
To achieve faster development cycles…
There is a new way to approach the development process that eliminates much of the complexity allowing you to achieve faster development cycles. We can assist you in revamping your product development process based on Lean principles for a “Lean Product Development” process that will allow you to:
- Define product features with your customer.
- Create a cross functional project management team, project milestones, team routines and a project ‘war room’ known as an Oobeya room.
- Introduce visual management concepts to visually manage the flow of activities in each department.
- Introduce short Develop/Build/Test/Improve cycles based on Agile concepts.
- Manage the project performance.
By applying the Production Preparation Process (3P), a Toyota-based product development process, to your product and process development, we can help you reduce the complexity of product development and speed your time-to-market.
