New Product Development
If you’ve ever managed an interdisciplinary manufacturing project (one that involves engineers, purchasing, production and contract manufacturing groups) you’ll know what I mean when I say each discipline speaks its own language. When you’re dealing with engineers you’re talking CAD and design; when you’re working with purchasing and production you’re talking ERP and SCM. And [...]
As I mentioned in my last article on new product introduction (NPI), launching a new product is stressful—even in the best of organizations. At Arena, we’ve been working on a couple of new products ourselves, Arena PartsList and Arena PDXViewer, so I’ve gotten to see a bit of what goes into new product introduction first hand. [...]
When you’re starting up, it can be difficult to know which business tools are essential to success and which can be put off until you have more capital and better market security. But there’s one place where you can’t afford to cut corners—establishing a fail-safe method to manage your product data. Navigating a product launch [...]
The economic downturn disrupted the supply of electronic components, leaving a supply chain with fewer players, each of whom has diminished capacity. This is putting serious strain on the manufacturers trying to build and launch new products quickly. My post this summer about the limited availability of tantalum capacitors was based on conversations with small [...]
*Lightbulb* You’ve just conceived a brilliant new invention. Now what? A recent post in the MFG.com Mojo blog offers suggestions to help you navigate the early stages of “bringing your creation to life.” MFG.com’s “4 Rules For Inventors & Entrepreneurs Sourcing Their Products” are: Enlist a designer – You’ll get better manufacturing results if you [...]
Whether your purview is operations, supply chain management, new product development/new product introduction or executive management, you’ll find information you can use in these two well-established—and newly free—resources. APICS, the Association of Operations Management, has made its APICS Operations Management Body of Knowledge (OMBOK) Framework available to the public, free of charge, for the first [...]
If you’re facing a tough design challenge you may want to look to nature to see how millions of years of evolution have addressed a similar problem. Biomimicry (which Marc mentioned in a blog post about tools to help design more environmentally responsible products) is the mimicking of nature to solve engineering or other human [...]
Joe gave some great advice in his series of posts on how to gather and apply useful product feedback. Quirky, a “social product development start-up” that builds and sells consumer products takes it a step further. The company uses crowdsourcing to determine first which products get designed and then which products get manufactured. A recent [...]
This is the final installment on how to gather and use relevant product feedback. In an earlier post I laid out this three-step framework: Go get it. Share it. Live it. In Step 1 I offered advice on how to collect good market information, and in Step 2 I described the importance of sharing that [...]
In the start of this series, I laid out a framework for gathering and using relevant product feedback: Go get it. Share it. Live it. Gathering the information is the critical first step in the process and it can be very rewarding. It’s great when people validate our ideas and it’s even better when they [...]
