Beat the competition with speed to market
Impact due to reducing product lifecycles and the need for speed and collaboration
In this Era of Innovation,the latest gadget becomes obsolete within no time. Better products come to market at cheaper prices and/or with higher value. The result is shorter product lifecycles.
The main effects of shorter lifecycles are:
- Need for New Product Introduction(NPI) at shorter intervals – speed to market is the only way to beat the competition
- Focus on cost effective / high value products
- Innovation in processes
The key enabler to achieve the above is
- More collaboration between stake holders.
A typical lifecycle involves the phases of Concept, Design, Prototype, Manufacturing, Service and Retire/Obsolete. Or in simple words…developing a product (Physical Development) and Manufacturing and selling it. Collaboration is done at two main levels as far as Product Lifecycle Management is considered. While Design Collaboration tools cater to the need of Physical Development of Product more effectively on a real-time basis, the Collaborative Product Commerce tools can cater to entire NPI from concept to Retire.
Design collaboration tools enables companies collaborate between design teams across geographies and with different vendors. These tools offer real-time shared work- spaces across geographies. Design is validated using high end analysis tools in order to eliminate errors in prototyping stage.
Design collaboration and validation tools ensures almost perfect product but given that fact that on an average only 30% of the new products succeed, care should be taken to ensure the product launched is successful in market. Collaborative Product Commerce (CPC) tools ensure that product launched is successful by collaborating with all departments and partners thereby ensuring availability of right resources. CPC tools also have archive of all relevant details of previous new product Introductions – this archive helps companies to reuse data already available and to avoid mistakes made in the past.
The other dimension to be considered is the need for customized products. Companies are forced to move from traditional ‘made-to-stock’ model to ‘build-to-demand’ model. This demands an efficient customer-producer interface. To deliver custom products on time, Manufacturers out-source most of the components and focus only on their core product – modular manufacturing helps companies to cut costs and deliver on time, this again calls for collaboration with all the suppliers.
Thus, CPC focuses on the manufacturer’s core business of designing and building products. Manufacturers interacting with suppliers are not new but collaborating real-time on many levels is made possible by CPC tools. Manufacturers interact with both customers and suppliers to share early product concepts, designs and prototypes to develop a product that is manufacturable, satisfy customer needs and ensure timeliness to market. CPC is about applying technology to the entire product lifecycle process of designing, engineering, building, delivering, and servicing the product while applying technology to do it better, faster, and cheaper. CPC helps to evaluate existing business practices and introduce more efficient new practices. Also it enables sharing of knowledge within the company and also with partners and customers.
To conclude the demands of accuracy in design, speed to market, customization, and the need to manufacture using pre-built components from third parties means that cross-enterprise collaboration is becoming a necessity for manufacturing success.
(With technology inputs from Aberdeen Group - www.aberdeen.com )
