Dr.-Ing. Carl U. Bauer | Management Consultant | 45527 Hattingen
Phone: +49 151 5076 9595 | Email: cube@cube-consulting.eu | Contact
Innovations should not end in the archive
Product development means taking risks. Regardless of a specific request, products or services are newly created. Whether it will later be sold is uncertain. So we never know if development will come up with a positive result. Results are only produced indirectly. At the same time, innovation requires a great deal of resources. In particular, the scarce resource of know-how is often used over longer periods of time.
Thus, development is often hijacked. From engineering, who calls something development, which is without risk. From sales, who wants to have preliminary examinations for a customer that remain without pay. Or simply from the necessities of everyday life. This is how product development is a matter of chance.
Let´s get product development implemented for good
Professional product-development means:
- write down a development strategy, derived from the corporate strategy.
- arrange development workshops and achieve results. Development is not always, but very often a group activity. It is helpful to work together on development topics, in efficient workshops that make the most of the skills of the participants. Only have participants take part in these workshops who are able to contribute towards the result. No rubbernecks please.
- Good requirements are essential for good development. Systemizing requirements management is often one of the first tasks. This prevents products from being created at random and ensures that those products with the greatest potential are developed first.
Development times can be shortened after good preparatory work through parallel development with pre-selected suppliers. Product costs will also frequently be reduced.
Better and Faster Product-Design
In many companies, engineering is a bottleneck. At the same time, there are constant complaints about too much bureaucracy in engineering. What to do? In my experience, there are always a series of options for action in engineering:
- How is the design-task described? Is there a product structure?
- Do those that require know the amount of work behind each requirement? Does engineering know? Does engineering know they know?
- Is standardization daily life or a future project?
- Is BOM-management helpful for the overall process?
- Is the interaction of sales, design and works preparation efficient?
Recommendations can be derived from the analysis of the situation. Concepts are worked out be about standardization, about BOM-management or about the development of a sales-oriented product structure, which also provides information about the amount of work required by engineering in order processing.
Do you want to increase your efficiency in engineering and product development?
Product-Development and Engineering are too influential for the long-term healthy development of a company to become “managed by chance”. It is indispensable to implement a development strategy and a robust development process. Capabilities and limitations need to be known throughout the company. A development workshop at the start is a main building block of a systematized development process, the result of which is a customer-centric product development.
Systematize engineering and product development
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