A keystone in launching a successful world-class product is systematic and thoughtful project preparation prior to deploying development and production resources. Some critical areas include:

• Strategic Business Planning & Project Selection
• Team Organization & Project Management
• Product Development Planning
• Product Cost & Value Planning
• Product Target Setting
• Quality & Reliability Planning
• Production Planning
• Supply Chain Planning
• Knowledge Management Strategies
• Collaboration Strategies
• Return on Investment Strategies

Strategic Planning & Project Selection
The first steps are to complete business and market analysis, update current portfolio and competitive capabilities, update product plans and select appropriate new product development projects. Development project priorities must be set based upon market needs, Return on Investment, timing, resources, and budgets.

Individual product plans are developed considering product life cycles and when to implement new technology, make major changes, and make minor product updates. These strategies set the criteria with which all preparation activities must align.

Team Organization & Project Management (PM)
Marketing, engineering, manufacturing, and other resource needs and cross-functional activities must be defined at a management level early to support new product development planning. This includes defining needs for the project organization structure, project definition and hard-point gate timing, cross-functional management, functional resource management, risk management, project cost and financial management, and PM tools.

Product Development Planning
A comprehensive product development plan, including budget, resources and schedule must be created for activities ranging from Target Setting and concept definition through production start-up and reliability monitoring. This emphasizes concurrent product and manufacturing process development activities and up-front planning, simulation and testing to minimize overall time and maximize development productivity.

Product Cost & Value Planning
Plans must look at the cost to design, build and support products and/or the total end user cost over the product's life. Product cost reduction plans help achieve cost targets while meeting the target value to customers.

Cost Reduction programs identify very early where waste and spending can be reduced or eliminated. The process begins during product planning and is closely integrated with early concept development activities, where costs are "built-in" to the product.

Cost models are integrated into trade-off decisions with performance, quality/reliability, and other target models to optimize designs throughout the development process. Analysis includes:

• Pre-production investments (planning, concept selection, design, prototype manufacturing infrastructure, tooling, automation, outsourcing, new processes, IT infrastructure, etc.)
• Production costs (manufacturing procurement materials and resources, assembly, make/buy decisions, transportation)
• Post-production costs (warranty, product upgrades, and repairs).

Product Target Setting
Requirements research (Voice of the Customer, lessons learned, competitive benchmarking, etc.) is first completed. This information is compiled in the form of customer wants/needs then converted into measurable targets, typically applying Quality Function Deployment methods and tools.

Quality & Reliability Planning
When considering new product features and capabilities, risk is inevitably introduced. Systematically measuring and comparing alternatives assesses and mitigates risk early in planning. This includes investment requirements in planning, engineering, and validation. Plans can be established to improve warranty costs, eliminate quality and reliability issues, and manage other expenses associated with poor quality.

Production Planning
Production Planning is closely integrated into the early Target Setting, concept definition, and cost-reduction planning process to concurrently define manufacturability and assembly concepts while improving early product concepts for cost and quality.

This includes initial manufacturing strategies (level of automation), make/but decisions with the supply chain planning activity, facility selection, manufacturing technology evaluation, identification of critical manufacturing and assembly issues, etc.

Supply Chain Planning
In this stage a review is completed of current/prospective strategic supply chain infrastructure, architecture and environment, bid processing and vendor selection, supplier involvement, supplier quality management, supplier data management, data interoperability/integration, collaboration and information exchange. New opportunities for volume leveraging, new technology introduction and supplier collaboration are also identified.

Knowledge Management Strategies
Here, the focus is on product and project data management, data integration and interoperability, collaboration and information exchange. The goal is to plan for optimizing real-time access to accurate and representative data and to reduce the risk of errors, allowing the enterprise to confidently share value chain knowledge. With concurrent development activities, the ability to manage data/knowledge and have regular and accurate access becomes increasingly important to minimize risk.

Collaboration Strategies
With today's global environment, the entire value chain must exchange data and knowledge quickly and reliably. Strategies must define requirements of technology and processes to facilitate communication between development teams, strategic partners, customers, and others.

Return on Investment Strategies
An underlying financial analysis in any Product Development Preparation program is the most important activity. The culmination of analyses and the alternatives they generate, as listed above, add up to a set of choices that need to ultimately be considered within one ROI analysis that realistically supports business, market, current capabilities, needed investments and other changes.

A Paradigm Shift in New Product Development

The move from physical prototypes to validate new product designs to analysis and simulation-led problem solving for virtual validation is leading the latest paradigm shift in product development. The impact relative to improvements in productivity, quality/reliability and time to market are tremendous.

ITI's TechKnowledgy Executive Series examines today's evolving product development process. There is no question that throughout engineering and manufacturing, a paradigm shift is well underway -- impacting how products are planned, designed, tested and built.

Undertaking this, the most challenging and rewarding changes relate to moving from traditional serial process with multiple design-build-test development programs to concurrent process, simulation-led design programs where first physical prototypes meet targets when tested. This change yields breakthrough levels of improvement in both time to market and productivity.

About ITI
International TechneGroup Incorporated (ITI) specializes in product development consulting: helping clients achieve Breakthrough Improvement�Eresults as measured by productivity and time to market --- the single biggest factors for success. We work with clients to identify and resolve problems associated with processes, technologies, and people/culture involved throughout today's global product development processes.