Product Development

In business and engineering, new product development (NPD) is the complete process of bringing a new product to market. New product development is described in the literature as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale and it can be tangible (that is, something physical you can touch) or intangible (like a service, experience, or belief). A good understanding of customer needs and wants, the competitive environment and the nature of the market represent the top required factors for the success of a new product. Cost, time and quality are the main variables that drive the customer needs. Aimed at these three variables, companies develop continuous practices and strategies to better satisfy the customer requirements and increase their market share by a regular development of new products. There are many uncertainties and challenges throughout the process which companies must face. The use of best practices and the elimination of barriers to communication are the main concerns for the management of NPD process.

The product development process typically consists of several activities that firms employ in the complex process of delivering new products to the market. A process management approach is used to provide a structure for NPD consistency and to enable continuous improvement. Every new product will pass through a series of stages from ideation through design, manufacturing and market introduction. In highly engineered products (aircraft, automotive, machinery) that deals with complexity the NPD process passes through phases, milestones and deliverables management requiring an equally complex organizational system to manage the process. The more complex the product the more complex the NPD process and management system. Complex NPD processes especially in military aircraft projects use an integrated product team approach. The process for managing large sale complex engineering products is much slower (10 plus years) than that deployed for fast moving consumer goods (weeks).

The product development process basically has three main phases:

The front-end marketing phases have been very well researched, with valuable models proposed. Peter Koen et al. provides a five-step front-end activity called front-end innovation: opportunity identification, opportunity analysis, idea genesis, idea selection, and idea and technology development. He also includes an engine in the middle of the five front-end stages and the possible outside barriers that can influence the process outcome. The engine represents the management driving the activities described. The front end of the innovation is the greatest area of weakness in the NPD process. This is mainly because the FFE is often chaotic, unpredictable and unstructured. Engineering design is the process whereby a technical solution is developed iteratively to solve a given problem The design stage is very important because at this stage most of the product life cycle costs are engaged. Previous research shows that 70–80% of the final product quality and 70% of the product entire life-cycle cost are determined in the product design phase, therefore the design-manufacturing interface represent the greatest opportunity for cost reduction. Design projects last from a few weeks to three years with an average of one year. Design and Commercialization phases usually start a very early collaboration. When the concept design is finished it will be sent to manufacturing plant for prototyping, developing a Concurrent Engineering approach by implementing practices such as QFD, DFM/DFA and more. The output of the design (engineering) is a set of product and process specifications – mostly in the form of drawings, and the output of manufacturing is the product ready for sale. Basically, the design team will develop drawings with technical specifications representing the future product, and will send it to the manufacturing plant to be executed. Solving product/process fit problems is of high priority in information communication design because 90% of the development effort must be scrapped if any changes are made after the release to manufacturing.

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