Geneviève Masson
P. Eng., Ph.D., Business Unit Manager. Engineering and Product Development at Merkur Inc.
Technological advances require companies to constantly adapt to remain competitive. The speed with which innovative new product development solutions can be deployed becomes a key factor in a company’s success, while reducing time-to-market is becoming a must for staying competitive.
What strategies and solutions can I adopt to position myself and stand out from the crowd? Geneviève Masson, Director of Engineering and Product Development, shares her tips for successfully marketing your products while integrating the product development process !
READ ALSO : Why is Value Analysis Crucial to Product Development?
Issues Impacting Time-to-Market
Labour Shortages and Lack of Specialists
The demand for skilled talent in product development has never been higher. However, the labor shortage that has been affecting the market for several years is slowing down the development process, as it takes time often to integrate new employees into the company’s teams, processes and methods, as well as to train them.
This is all truer when specialists or experts are sought in this context. Constant technological advances demand precise skills, and the lack of specialists – whether in simulation, electronics, programming or new technologies – also inevitably leads to delays in product development.
Supply Chain Challenges
Even today, supplier instabilities, geopolitical tensions, climatic disruptions and delivery delays hamper the supply chain, directly impacting the time-to-market of new products. As a result, engineering is forced to revise its concepts to adjust to new suppliers, assess their reliability, review production costs and manage the risks inherent in these budding partnerships. This constant adaptation becomes essential to navigate in a complex and changing environment.
High Interest Rates and Production Costs
High interest rates make borrowing more expensive, increasing the cost of financing for companies and delaying the investments required for the acquisition of equipment, essential to speeding up the process of bringing new products to market and encouraging companies to maximize the use of existing resources to innovate.
If companies do venture to invest, production costs eat into profit margins, and financial constraints can also restrict the capacity for innovation by reducing the funds allocated to research, development and implementation of new ideas, thereby prolonging time-to-market or diminishing the novelty of future products.
The Product Development Process Pays Off!
Faced with these challenges, it is imperative to adopt innovative and proven strategies and solutions to accelerate the time-to-market of new products and remain competitive. The implementation of a product development process and an optimized team organization can have a considerable impact on the latter.
Firstly, implementing this process improves operational efficiency by determining clear workflows, roles and responsibilities for each department, and ensuring effective coordination with clear milestones. Faster decision-making can be observed among our customers who have implemented a product development process where those responsible are clearly identified, and presentations are ready for milestone meetings.
What’s more, defining structured processes and quality controls upstream will facilitate the arrival of new employees by reducing integration issues and facilitating their autonomy and rapid skills development.
A few points to keep in mind
Over the years, we’ve identified a few points to keep in mind when implementing the product development process. Make sure you include all your company’s functions at every stage of your product development process; from marketing to finance, to the industrialization and service teams, they will be able to provide the right information, at the right time, and ensure that every facet of your product development is covered. When defining requirements and needs, it’s vital to consider not only the technical aspects, but also the customer’s expectations.
Along the way, be sure to include the marketing team, with its market analyses and VOC (voice of the customer), who will be able to guide you through the development of the specifications. Don’t forget that the specifications must be validated by management before engineering activities begin, to prevent excessive revisions and ensure a smooth start to the process.
In terms of human resources, developing the project portfolio upstream guarantees the availability of the required resources and the delivery of products. Finally, early identification of design and project risks will enable potential challenges to be anticipated and overcome right from the start of the project. By involving all teams in the process, we reduce the risk of engineering or process change requests, cost reductions, misunderstood or unfounded customer needs requiring redesign, and ensure that our product’s time-to-market is met.
Don’t forget to integrate regulatory and standards requirements from the outset and throughout the process, introduce Value Stream Mapping (VSM) concepts to eliminate waste, and keep things simple by documenting the process from the outset and using certain support tools such as PLM or Electronic Document Management (EDM) software.
The crucial and complex challenge of reducing time-to-market in today’s business landscape involves overcoming obstacles such as labor shortages, lack of specialists, supply chain constraints and production costs.
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