IMPROVING YOUR PRODUCT LAUNCH SUCCESS

It's no secret that in today's rapidly evolving marketplace, product innovation—and the ability to get new products to market rapidly and efficiently—can make the difference between success and failure. Yet the challenges involved in transitioning new products from development to manufacturing often make effective product introductions difficult.

Frequent engineering changes during the highly fluid product design process require ongoing collaboration among design engineers, manufacturers, and suppliers as products move towards larger-scale production. As product design stabilizes, responsibility for finalized portions of a new product are continually transferred to manufacturing, but design engineering maintains control of still-evolving portions.

Unfortunately, incompatibility between engineering prototype management applications and the planning tools used by manufacturers and suppliers frequently makes the transition a nightmare. Incongruent spreadsheets, miscommunication, and ad hoc planning strategies often result in poor execution and failure to accurately align procurement with each phase of product ramp-up. This in turn creates problems and delays that devour margins and eradicate anticipated market gains.

Andrew Gort is the former executive vice president of global supply chain management for Celestica and has more than 30 years of experience in material sourcing, procurement, production planning and control, inventory management, logistics, and order fulfillment in both the OEM and CM manufacturing environments.
Contact Andrew at Andrew@andrewgort.com.

A new approach is warranted—one which provides the visibility and control that design engineers and manufacturers need to effectively co-manage each step of a new product release.

Industry leaders are turning to Response Management for the answer. Response Management is a new solution category that helps companies effectively manage in situations where change is the norm and collaboration across organizational boundaries is critical. By directly integrating with product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, ERP, and planning tools, Response Management applications provide a single, cohesive solution through which engineers, manufacturers, and suppliers can:

Exchange critical information and collaborate in real time to effectively share continually changing responsibilities from product inception to launch.

Instantly model multiple product revision scenarios to accurately pinpoint procurement needs and optimize use of existing inventory.

Simulate various cut-in dates for incremental product revisions to enhance timing and meet customer and market demands.

Identify and order scarce and long lead-time components on a timely basis to ensure go-to-market deadlines are met.

As products continue evolving at an ever-faster pace, the need to capture critical demand windows through rapid innovation and product release becomes more critical than ever. Companies that seek core competence in the capabilities provided by Response Management will dramatically enhance their ability to manage the transition process—enabling them to seize new market opportunities and gain competitive advantage.