Christa Prokos
Explore the importance of New Product Introduction (NPI) and what a modern PLM system can offer, focusing on three critical process improvements: agility, collaboration and efficiency.
Product Lifecycle Management is a must-have in today’s competitive, ever-evolving manufacturing landscape. PLM can help you accelerate product development, enhance supply chain agility, foster collaboration, and minimize time wasted on low-value tasks.
With any product, there’s an initial investment. Whether it’s a variant, a new product, or a different configuration, there’s always an investment. Over time, through market entry, you’ll see revenue, as that’s the purpose of bringing a product to market. However, numerous forces naturally come into play. While we can’t eliminate these forces, we can improve how we handle them.
For example, process inconsistency, quality issues, launch delays, and other unforeseen factors often arise. According to a Gartner study, manufacturers report that new product introductions are typically delayed by at least one month. Furthermore, 83% of products fail to hit cost targets, and 72% fail to meet profitability targets, according to Harvard Business Review. Many companies are stuck in this chaos.
Hurdles to new product introduction
Why is it so hard to bring products to market on time and on budget? The problem largely stems from companies operating in functional silos. Department heads set up processes using whatever tools are available, typically Excel, email, and local shared drives. While some individuals may be organized, processes involving multiple functions can be chaotic, leading to errors, delays, and inefficiency.
A more streamlined process can eliminate much of the confusion and connect teams with PLM. Centralizing workflows and access to the most up-to-date information when and where it’s needed can significantly improve product development and supply chain agility, enhance collaboration, and reduce low-value tasks.
PLM connects your data, people, and processes across your enterprise. Although it may sound simple, the impact is substantial. PLM can help reduce the total investment, time to profitability, and increase total revenue.
The benefits of PLM for new product introduction
Product development agility
Product development agility refers to an organization’s ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances while maintaining high velocity and high-quality design, testing, and production. How quickly can your company identify change and pivot to address it?
Early product development decisions, such as part selection and sourcing and manufacturing strategies, largely determine the cost and performance profile of the product. Once a product is ready for prototyping, these decisions are challenging, if not impossible, to change.
The flattening of the cost curve isn’t inherently bad. We want product innovation early so that we have time to address production challenges. However, the better we are at iterating through design and adapting to changing requirements, the better the product will be once we’ve locked in the performance profile.
Late changes are costly and disruptive. As a product progresses through its lifecycle, changes become dramatically more expensive. Executing warranties is far more expensive than fixing a product before it leaves the factory. Similarly, fixing a design before building prototypes is less costly.
Getting designs right in the early stages lead to fewer schedule and warranty impacts as the product goes to market. Late changes do less and cost more.
Enhanced collaboration
Collaboration is essential to the new product introduction process. However, nearly half of all companies surveyed by Tech-Clarity reported significant challenges in collaboration. Internal collaboration issues, such as working on outdated data, are common. Companies also see challenges collaborating with other departments and external entities like customers or suppliers.
Wasted engineering productivity is a common reason companies consider PLM. Tech-Clarity found that engineers waste an average of 20% of their time managing design data—equivalent to one day per week.
Many companies design new products in a vacuum. Engineering teams creating products based on market requirements without input from downstream functions. Once a design is complete, it’s handed over to manufacturing, causing delays and high change costs as downstream functions scramble to address challenges.
Providing product development teams with a complete, accurate view of product information, such as cost, failure rates, part usage, and supplier preferences, enables better choices and trade-offs, and quicker identification and reuse of existing parts and modules.
Early cross-functional collaboration allows downstream functions to catch potential problems early when changes are fast and inexpensive. The result is lower lifetime change costs, fewer delays, and reduced product and quality costs.
Instead of using translations between authoring tools and stakeholders switching systems, all product CAD data is managed in one location, accessible when needed. Centralizing data in a cloud-based, interactive system ensures the latest data is available and reviewers can provide feedback directly through the tools they work best in.
Reduced time spend on low-value tasks
Appropriate technology can make low-value tasks more efficient or even unnecessary. Research shows significant time is wasted looking for product data—up to two working days per week or two months per year. Engineers interact with an average of 10 systems for change processes.
Centralizing information in one location is essential. For instance, keeping conceptual designs in shared folders, quality artifacts in separate systems, and approved parts catalogs in ERP systems inaccessible to designers is inefficient.
PLM helps speed up and control data release through automated data and attribute checks, saving time spent on manual inspection. PLM can inspect the entire BOM in bulk, isolate key issues, and notify relevant parties for changes.
Updating drawing tables and revision numbers can be automated, freeing up time for other tasks. Drawing title blocks are automatically populated, and drawings are translated to PDFs at the end of every release workflow.
Concurrent engineering allows design teams to make changes to products or test new ideas without affecting released models. Designers can clone or create new development versions without worrying about impacting in-review or released datasets, encouraging innovation and minimizing disruptions.
Image with the proper data management systems you could achieve this:
- Instead of having documents, files, and data spread across multiple systems, all data is managed in one system and shared as a complete package.
- Instead of reviewers inspecting every detail manually, investigations are automated, notifying teams about key issues and decisions at the right time.
- Instead of waiting for reviews to finish, design teams can start on the next iteration in parallel, reducing effort and fostering innovation.
Autodesk solutions for new product introduction
Autodesk Fusion Manage: Connect People, Processes, and Data
Streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and gain real-time visibility with PLM.
Autodesk Fusion Mange is a cloud PLM system that connects your people, processes, and data. It’s configurable, flexible, easy-to-use, and easily scales to adapt to your business. It also has an open API for integration with other systems like PDM, ERP, and CRM.
Optimize Data Management with Autodesk Vault
Secure, organize, and manage your engineering data efficiently.
Autodesk Vault is a product data management (PDM) software seamlessly integrates with Autodesk design tools and other CAD systems, ensuring that everyone works from a centralized source of organized data. By using Autodesk Vault, teams can enhance collaboration and streamline workflows across engineering, manufacturing, and extended teams. The software also allows users to automate design and engineering processes, control access and editing permissions, and track revisions and design history efficiently.
Conclusion
PLM improves and speeds up new product introduction. It centralizes organizational processes across teams, creating clear links between processes and target data. It also provides guidance and flexibility for evolving processes and brings all information together in a consumable and shareable format.
Improving agility, collaboration, and efficiency through PLM can transform your new product introduction processes, helping you move faster and achieve better outcomes. By leveraging modern PLM systems, you can streamline workflows, enhance cross-functional collaboration, and reduce time spent on low-value tasks, ultimately driving faster and more successful product introductions.
Embrace the power of PLM to connect your data, people, and processes, and unlock the potential to innovate and excel in today’s competitive market.