The Road to the Future: How Product Development Can Make the Journey More Profitable

The most important asset a manufacturer can possess is the ability to consistently create winning products. From a customer’s viewpoint, a winning product is one they want to buy. From a manufacturer’s viewpoint, a winning product is one that meets the spec they started out with, including hitting the targets for time-to-market, cost, manufacturability, and quality.

The capability of a company to create winning products is tied to its product-development processes. While product-development processes vary from company to company, all have five building-blocks in common:

• Information
• Knowledge
• Communication
• Decision
• Execution

For a manufacturer to optimize their product-development process, they must use technology in support of optimizing each of the five building-blocks. The purpose of this software technology is to enable those involved in the product-development process to do their jobs more effectively.

Incremental improvements brought about by software that addresses all of the building-blocks can drive step-improvements in a company’s product-development process.

Companies which are evaluating product-development tools should pay careful attention to usability, and favor products which are “discoverable.” (That is, they can be learned independently of a formal training course by users who are experienced in their domain.)

Further, they should specifically look for products which support open interfaces and open data standards, as these are necessary not just for simple interoperability with other systems, but for the effective use of information and knowledge generated by other systems, both inside and outside of the product development process.

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