Speed-to-Market - Get it Right for your Business
The first step in launching a new product is designing one. With available tools, once product design is frozen, manufacturing and launching can be managed effectively. The time taken to freeze the design is highly unpredictable. From my previous post, we will discuss on collaborative design and effectively using the historical data.
The starting point is having a concept design. For this inputs from Marketing, Customers, Service, vendors, Manufacturing, Quality and other related departments needs to be collated – this forms the basis of bringing out a concept design. Product Information Management (PIM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools come handy in collating information from different sources and get the concept design approved by all departments that provided the inputs. For instance, customers of a particular car would have preferred a reverse sensor and marketing would have provided input that other cars in the same segment has the sensor. In concept design we may propose a simple cost effective electronic sensor or have a high-end rear view camera with an internal screen. Both will address the problem, but the Marketing personnel would know what competitors offer in the same segment. We need to take right decision based on feedback from Marketing and also need to validate the decision with other departments connected before actually incorporating the feature in the car. There could be number of features like this and all needs to be validated and requires approval from many departments. The entire concept phase can be automated using PIM/PLM tools. So before starting the design we have buy-in from all concerned departments. If we get this wrong and some problem comes at later stage it will delay the speed to market and in worst case -the product fails.
We will discuss about detail design in my next post.
