ActionWorks® Solutions for Manufacturing
New Product Development
New product development time lines for manufacturing firms can span many years. Reducing time-to-market in this core business process minimizes the gap between product requirements at the start of a development process and customer needs and desires when the product is delivered. Additionally, being first to market in a product category is almost always associated with high market share and margins. Further, product development delays certainly cause cost overruns. Finally, there is very strong evidence that having product development times that are consistently the shortest in an industry produces sustainable competitive advantage. For all these reasons, and many more, being faster than your competitors in new product development is a very powerful weapon.
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Delivering innovative products to market faster typically falls under the domain of new product development departments, but this group is not solely responsible for the creation, delivery, and success of new products.
While Product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions enable product development groups to save and update product information associated with development projects, they don't create competitive advantage. Why not? Because everyone of your competitors can buy the same or a similar system, and also gain the advantage of facilitating basic collaboration and workflow tools (as described in our White Paper Enabling BPM). In short they are the data layer to the new product development process. But this data layer needs to be combined with the process layer to create speed (and quality and cost savings). Adding a bit of document routing and approval workflow software within the development department just doesn't create the speed you need. Why not?
Because new product development is a core business process that cuts across departmental and corporate boundaries, and involves decision makers from nearly every business function: engineering, design, manufacturing, marketing, finance, legal, and so forth. Each of these skilled people knows about his or her part of the process and their direct interactions with each other, but not about the details of the overall process itself. Only your process owner and core team need to know everything about a particular process. The difficulty lays in tying all of these disparate groups together, so the process can flow seamlessly across departments and corporate boundaries to customers and suppliers. This requires a process layer, like ActionWorks®.
Twenty years of process experience here at Action Technologies has taught us that most of the waste in the new product development process derives not from within an organization's specific business functions, but in the lack of coordination among the functions. Action Technologies' solution, based on the ActionWorks Business Interaction Model, links and orchestrates all the commitments, decisions, actions, information systems, and handoffs between departments—and outside companies—that make up your new product development process, giving everyone involved clear visibility and accountability. This solution has translated into competitive advantage in speed, market leadership, and increased profitability for our Fortune 1000 customers.
Learn how International Truck and Engine Corp. regained market position by streamlining its product development processes. Visit the Case Studies page on the Library page for additional eamples.
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