The ability to design and bring new products to market is essential for a company to remain competitive in the short and long term. It is a driver of business performance and enables a company to remain price competitive and improve quality. The decisions made at an early stage of product design have an impact on all company functions, from procurement to production and distribution. In addition, digital technology offers the opportunity to redesign processes and improve efficiency.
To address these challenges, the company must redesign its organization, develop its skills and optimize ways of working, particularly by taking advantage of digital technology to improve performance.
Four points seem essential to us: R&D and engineering have to increasingly integrate their suppliers and leverage new technologies (technical data management), the processes of new product introduction have to be challenged to reduce cycle times as much as possible from design to market, and innovation portfolio management has to be redone to take advantage of potential synergies. Finally, (re)design to cost must be used as a competitive lever by challenging the functions of the product (or service) to remove all resources that do not contribute directly to it.