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NPD

NPD is the new frontier for any business, at the time when innovation is the key business success factor. To continue growing profitably for a long time, any company must launch a succession of hit products. Current mainstay products are bound to decline eventually; with technology being a big disruptor, the period for which products can be expected to maintain profitability and competitive strengths are shrinking. Development of profitable products with advanced performance is the key element for a business management. Its high time for all future looking organizations to learn and adapt our well researched and proven model of NPD.

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To develop a hit-product, management must do up-front portfolio planning for products, setting broad guidelines on price, cost, product and customers but leaving the solution space wide open. Prioritized product program shall be initiated by selecting a Project Leader to lead the program. Leader forms a team of bright engineers selected carefully from all critical functions. The leader with his team begins collecting preliminary information to lay out their collective thinking about the product, its target market, and some key attributes—size, look, target customers, features, and competitive products. 

An in depth and detailed product planning is carried out by the team to understand voice of the customer. Market visits are scientifically planned to understand own product along with selected competitive products. It is done purely from customers' point of view and not with designers' mind. Customer voice is processed using our uniquely evolved "House of Quality," to arrive at the product image, product concept, design concept and targets for key quality elements.

House of Quality
KANO MODEL

Product or service is about much more than just functionality, its also about customer's emotions. Every customer buying a new car expect it to stop when the brake-pedal is pressed, but many may get delighted by its voice-activated parking-assist system. The Kano Model encourages to think about how products relate to customers' needs, while moving away from "more the better" to "less is more" thinking concept.

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Constantly introducing new features to any product can be expensive and adds to complexity. Not necessarily improving customer satisfaction. On the other hand, adding a particularly attractive feature derived through Kano Model delights customers and increases sales without costing more.

After deep customer understanding, the team needs to identify and close critical knowledge gaps that stand between their current know-how and what they need to learn to create new value. Whether in engineering, manufacturing, installation, logistics or service, team must understand how they will deliver better value. Team visits the process lines to understand the quality, production, material, handling, and infrastructure issues. All the other infrastructure limitations like, design facilities, testing facilities, validation simulations, standards are evaluated to grasp the  situation at hand.

In light of these, the design team broadly explores the solution space from all perspectives - customer, supplier, engineering functions, manufacturing. These are hand drawn sketches, with superior mind-body connections. Sketching, sharing ideas, discussing, and then sketching some more allows for a broad exploration of the solution space. Set-based experimentation continues to be a powerful tool as team add more workstreams to the process of understanding. Researching broadly, searching for patterns, debating, forming hypothesis, rigorously testing, deselecting and converging across workstreams.

SBCE: Set Based Concurrent Engineering

Set Based Concurrent Engineering

Set based concurrent engineering is an approach to the design of products and services in which sets of ideas are evaluated. Engineers use trade-off curves and design guidelines to describe known feasible design sets, and thus focus the search for designs. They identify and develop multiple alternatives, and eliminate alternatives only when proven inferior or infeasible. This approach yields substantial organizational learning. It takes less time and costs less in the long term than typical point-based engineering systems that select a design solution early in the development process, with the typical consequence of false starts, rework, failed projects, and minimal learning.

With above front-loading, we help to develop "first time right design of product and processes.

New Product Development Process

We offer comprehensive services on NPD

  • Knowledge based training & project hand holding for New Product Development and introduction

  • Business alignment to customer using global best practices & frugal engineering, creating “hit products”

  • Developing processes and infrastructure along with new product development assuring quality and  reliability

  • Developing processes to ramp up and ramp down quality product fulfilling changing customer demand

  • Action learning programs on QFD,  DFMEA, DFMA, FTA … etc.

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