Five Ways to Get Products to Market Faster Than Competitors

1High Tech & Electronics Industry How To Here are five steps you can take to get first-to-market advantage. 5 ways to get products to market faster It pays to have good ideas for new products—especially if your company can turn its ideas into new products faster than the competition. High tech and electronics companies that consistently get their products to market first consistently enjoy premium pricing—until competitors catch up and drive prices down. PwC projects that revenue from emerging electronics product categories will grow 242% in 2014 and another 108% in 2015. That’s considerable potential revenue and profit for companies can accelerate new product development. 1 Build the map first High tech and electronics companies must take a disciplined approach at every step of the new product lifecycle. This includes creating a high-level roadmap for what you plan to develop and how. Consider applying value stream mapping, a lean manufacturing methodology, to this stage of your product development. All key participants in your new product initiative work together to identify each step in the process, the inputs required, and the outputs that will result. Each step is then analyzed to determine if it really adds value. If it doesn’t, you can bypass it. High Tech & Electronics High Tech & Electronics Industry How To 2 If the step is valid, you then determine if there is a better approach. You then get a graphical roadmap that defines the essential processes for creating the product in the most efficient way. Industry Week magazine has published a detailed description of value stream mapping that concludes with a statement that will resonate with high tech and electronics companies: “Use it properly and completely and it will provide a direct path to process optimization and an operation that is assured long-term survival.” 2 Build the workflows next With your roadmap in hand, the next step is to define the specific tasks required to complete each distinct process. At this point, it’s helpful to analyze the interrelationships between tasks to identify ways to complete multiple steps at the same time. There will be product development phases that require a serial approach, where nothing happens on one phase until a previous phase has been completed. But with careful analysis, you can identify steps in your new product initiative that can be done in parallel to help you shorten your time to market. 4Categorize parts to the point of uniqueness Just as you avoid development efforts that repeat what’s already been done, you can and should guard against specifying multiple parts that do essentially the same thing. Implement Group Technology, a systematic approach to describing and categorizing parts by material, shape, size, electrical properties, and other physical and performance characteristics. Group Technology uses a “tree” structure to refine the categorization of parts to the point of uniqueness. After doing this, most companies find a surprising number of equivalent parts—either exactly the same or close—that are specified in bills of materials for several different products. When development engineers find and use an existing part instead of specifying something new, you can avoid the time and cost of locating, sourcing and acquiring a part you really don’t need. More effective management of parts reduces design time, manufacturing set up time, and manufacturing throughput time. It can also help reduce costs for raw materials and in process inventory. High Tech & Electronics Industry How To 3 3 Enable workflows with communications and collaboration With the best possible workflow in place, it’s critical to create an effective communications infrastructure—especially when it fosters collaboration across all teams participating in the new product development. This infrastructure builds on the tasks defined in your workflow to define the individuals and teams required to complete each task. Using engineering release software to formalize processes makes it clear who does what (and when), and helps avoid numerous missteps that increase time and costs. The right communications infrastructure can help you manage version control, check-out and check-in procedures, and messaging. Engineering release software won’t preclude the need for face-to-face meetings, but it can help to make those meetings more efficient. 5Learn from the past Use past product development experiences to refine and improve all your new product initiatives. Consider implementing an engineering release system, so you can retain a detailed history of how each project progressed, where there were delays or late completions, and other lessons that can guide you in streamlining processes and preventing delays and other problems on future projects. Copyright © 2014 Infor. All rights reserved. The word and design marks set forth herein are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Infor and/or related affiliates and subsidiaries. All other trademarks listed herein are the property of their respective owners. www.infor.com. 641 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10011 Get more information on Infor High Tech & Electronics › Share this:    INF-1453638-en-US-1214-1