Industry Forum

In the typical launch phase of product life cycle the problems faced by most manufacturing companies lies not only in accelerating and maintaining sales after the launch but in reducing the costly development time before the launch. In an effort to improve timelines and effectiveness, a number of organisations are experimenting with different best practices in their NPI processes. Adopting best practices in product launch within supply chain provides confidence for the customer to partner on new programme developments and in turn provides growth opportunities for an organisation.

Success of most product launches today is dependent on key resources within an organisation. These people come from cross functional team (sales, design and development engineering, manufacturing engineering, quality assurance and so on). To get the fundamentals right companies need to work on a standard approach for launch excellence and successful implementation would depend on the required skills existing in cross functional team 

Fig. 1: Industry forum NPI model for Launch excellence

Industry Forum has developed a NPI model for Launch Excellence (Fig. 1) which can help organisations to achieve this desired performance.

Product and technology roadmap element will help us to align our development efforts in organisation and efficiently manage product lifecycles while meeting customer needs. This element will play a key role in business strategy with definition of what new products or technology will contribute towards business growth targets

Product costing and Portfolio analysis will help us match profitable solutions existing within our business with focussed Product Market Groups. This in turn will work as a good input for business development and help them to align bid opportunities with our commercial strengths in the business

S&OP link with NPI will help us to manage resource and capacity balance while introducing new products in the business

Key elements of stable foundation have a very close link to the business strategy

NPI Process pillar will define a structure and a route map with cross functional roles and responsibilities to successfully complete a product introduction

Project management pillar will help the governance of each individual product introduction going through an organisation

Design Excellence pillar will help us in managing product risks and driving value throughout the product design and development process

Manufacturing Process Design pillar will help us to pick the right and most efficient manufacturing solution driving right first time approach

Product and Process Validation pillar will help us to validate customer requirements related to product and internal organisation requirements of a repeatable manufacturing process

Supply chain readiness pillar will help us to support the supply chain during NPI and ensure their readiness to launch products right first time and On Time In Full to our organisation.

Industry standards are valuable to keep each of the Process pillars elements intact and aligned

As an output, implementation of this model has already proven to deliver Product Launch Excellence which can be measured by Product Launch Right First time, On Time in Full and at Target cost

Industry Forum has launched a new course in 2019 which will help to build further understanding of launch excellence model in product lifecycle. For more details please click here or get in touch at [email protected]

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