CH.

11: PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

PROJECT: Create Milestones
Team Under One Roof:
Teaming up people from various disciplines minimizes paperwork
and meetings and maximizes informal discussions
Informal decision-making between parallel teams also enhances the
teams ownership of the decision and ultimately the product
Team members own a decision more readily than when they
communicate from one area to another, one building to another, or
possibly from one city to another
This type of strategy permits simultaneous engineering, which is
simply bringing involved personnel together every day to proceed
with their assignments and work more smoothly
Extending the simultaneous engineering idea is computer aided
engineering (CAE), which permits the engineers to design, test and
analyze new components simultaneously before building the
prototype. This saves time and money and improves the overall
quality of the component.

Team Under One Roof (Contd.)
CAE, with centralized work stations, enhances the
under-one-roof concept by allowing all of the work to be
to be done in one in one location rather than in several
different areas. The time saved can be used to examine
more alternatives
Real-time project management enhances the under-one-
roof concept by allowing team members to know exactly
where they are in the project at any given (project status)
and to deal immediately with any barriers to achieve
project goals. Real-time project management begins with
setting goals and preparing a project planning diagram.
Concept to Market: Product Planning Cycle
The concept-to-market (CTM) cycle with the team under one roof is
aimed at bringing the product to market faster, more efficiently, and
with higher quality
Companies that have used this approach have seen reductions in
time, costs, and defects through improved communications,
simultaneous engineering and real time problem solving and
decision making
Mounting a successful product introduction to meet customers
requirements needs to be done in expilicit development stages
Such an approach allows the project to be checked at defined
intervals
Measuring progress with major milestones that are established at
the start or end of each phase will provide excellent project control

Concept to Market: Product Planning Cycle
(Contd.)
Different companies use different versions of product planning
cycles, all tailored to the companys structure and to the nature of
the product to be marketed
Intense competition among product-oriented firms has resulted in
continuous revisions to product development cycles primarily
quality improvements and reductions in cycle time
Auto manufacturers have been especially active in striving to
improve quality and reduce cycle time, using methods of selected
japanese and US manufacturers as benchmarks
To prepare the entire milestone schedule, the project team will
identify the major activities within each phase that are needed to
complete that specific phase.
When scheduling the project, these dates, known as interim
milestones, become important for maintaining control