More development with less resource.
Failure is the reward for businesses that are not ahead of their competitors in developing and introducing new products and services that uniquely anticipate and meet the requirements of customers. In the past, this was attempted by using a mixture of old market data and functional, disconnected development activities. Such an approach no longer works. Now, success is won through a critical business process: Time to Market.
Competitive advantage comes from delivering to customers more value with fewer resources than other companies in the market. Innovation is one of the key elements of value. In fact there are few businesses in which product life cycles and a steady flow of innovation are not critical success factors: baby rattles, engagement rings, and beer mugs for example. Nearly every other type of product ages and must be replaced with new and fresh ideas. If one company fails to deliver in this regard then another will succeed and walk off with the lion’s share of the market.
Success in maintaining a healthy mix of innovation requires the recognition of opportunities and the marshaling of development resources in a seamless, fast, cost effective, and interactive process. We call this process Time to Market or TTM. It involves the interaction of the Sales, Engineering, Manufacturing, Finance, Service, and Distribution functions.
Historically, companies treated development as they did the rest of the business, as a set of loosely linked functions existing in silos. Sales people heard ideas from customers or other sales people and called friends in engineering. Engineers attended trade shows and read journals with bright new ideas that they folded into designs for the pure elegance involved. Production people looked for long runs and refused to run prototypes. Financial leading lights wanted low costs, irrespective of anything else. Service and distribution people wanted simplicity and full containers.
Until the end of the second wave of managerial capitalism (around the time of the first oil shock) product development was relatively simple. A functional approach to innovation was fine. Polaroid, Xerox, IBM, Ford, Procter & Gamble and others, performed well with long development cycles, high inventories, and large rework percentages. Capital and economies of scale determined business winners. Now, over thirty years later, with the Internet firmly established and globalization the rule, we are into yet another business strata, the Fourth Wave. Capital is easily obtainable and modern production methodology has made the old competition model obsolete. Producers of every product and service, from the simplest toys to highly sophisticated vehicles, must now manage innovation and fulfillment for value.
Accomplishing this requires the translation of strategy into an actionable plan. An action plan and its implementation must include concept definition and design implementation through production and ultimate delivery of required value as defined by the customer. Doing so must also meet stakeholder objectives.
The foundation of the World Class TTM Process is made up of core activities involving all the direct business units responsible for turning resource input into customer output.
Integrating, analyzing, and controlling divergent tasks and technologies can no longer be left to any single business unit or even collections of business units. Divergent Business activities must be seamlessly linked to shareholders, suppliers, customers, and employees in a World Class TTM Process. It must be a process that converts effectively formulated strategies into high customer value in both product and service by connecting the end customer’s needs directly to the development process.
Since the activities and functions involved in creating more value from less input require the marriage of disparate technology, enabling processes are required to prevent silo thinking and encourage concurrent rather than linear task completion.
Since World Class TTM must do more than maintain the status quo, measuring performance against known benchmarks is necessary to motivate the creation of more output with less input. World class TTM, therefore, must possess the tools by which progress towards world-class performance can be measured.
A process is a set of interrelated concurrent and consecutive activities that convert existing resource inputs into planned outputs. The speed and efficiency by which the output results are achieved is in a large measure dependent upon the structure of the process and sub-processes that convert the inputs into outputs. While a good process will have trouble with an ineffectively formulated strategy, the majority of failures occur in the way the process executes and implements a solution.
“Faster, in almost every case, is better. From decision-making to deal-making to communications to product introduction, speed, more often than not, ends up being the competitive differentiator.”
Jack Welch, CEO General Electric
Any Design/Development Process consists of Actions in Process (AIP) by which inputs, such as research findings, technical advances, and other knowledge, are transformed into new, modified, or improved products and services.
Are the correct AIPs being tackled? How well are they being done? Does performance measure up to the competition? Where is the process on the journey to world-class performance?
Every journey begins with a step, and the performance improvement process begins with the assessment of current strengths and weaknesses. World Class TTM provides a solution that connects all stakeholders’ needs into a cohesive process. A process that, if pursued aggressively, systematically, and relentlessly can result in time to market reductions of greater than 50%, with commensurate increases in productivity, quality, and on-time delivery.
The same basic principles that have resulted in manufacturing improvements can be applied to the design process, or for that matter, to any process.
A good example is the insidious lot size. Manufacturers all over the world have been busy for decades breaking down the infrastructure built up around large lot sizes. In the design area lot size is called work package size. Today’s project reviews (work packages) can immediately be associated with a large unwieldy, and cumbersome infrastructure. Similarly, wait times translate into white space, rework into Engineering Change Requests, and bottlenecks into golden spikes.
World Class TTM provides the core processes, enabling processes, and the tools to systematically:
World Class TTM rests on pillars consisting of core processes, enabling processes, and tools. These processes and tools, correctly applied, minimize the learning curves involved in providing faster, better, and cheaper products and services in tune with market and customer needs. And, by the way, assure that cost and pricing capabilities to reward these innovations also exist.
Receive increasing value from products and services, driven by product introductions at the forefront of technology. They obtain on-time deliveries of high quality while finding it easy to do business within the process.
Find that working within clear and structured processes is interesting and challenging. High job satisfaction results from a team spirit in which members are empowered and rewarded based on performance to defined measures.
Relationships are stable, and achieving a partnering relationship in an ever-improving process facilitates trust.
Enjoy financial returns that are best in class and can expect increasing value and growth. Risk, now taken free of surprises, is accepted and managed.