This assessment enables companies to evaluate the effectiveness and long term viability of their existing product development process and identify areas for improvement. It takes into account four major factors – Management, Infrastructure, Teams/Resources and Metrics. These four factors have been established from numerous surveys and studies to be critical to the success and effectiveness of an organization’s new product development process
WINOVIA® LLC
WINOVIA® LLC, a consulting company that provides customized, sustainable solutions, strategies and training in new product development, quality management and high performance materials. WINOVIA LLC employs the Six Sigma and Design for Six Sigma philosophy with the goal of strategic market penetration, improving product and process quality, streamlining business processes, reducing operational costs, and increasing revenues and profits for its clients.
In partnership with Winovia LLC NeuraMetrics™ has developed an Assessment of design for six sigma and new product development implementation……. Successful implementation of Design for Six Sigma and New Product Development involves best practices in Management, Infrastructure, Teams and resources and Metrics.
Dr. Vinny Sastri has designed a New Product Assessment tool that enables companies to evaluate the effectiveness and long term viability of their existing product development process and identify areas for improvement. It takes into account four major factors – Management, Infrastructure, Teams/Resources and Metrics. These four factors have been established from numerous surveys and studies to be critical to the success and effectiveness of an organization’s new product development process. Management criteria include commitment, leadership and engagement. Infrastructure takes into account the existence of a corporate-wide standardized process, use of collaborative software, effective communication between functions, continuous improvement and a market focused process. The section on resources and teams deals with resource management, team effectiveness, team empowerment and skills and training. The fourth factor Metrics assesses whether an organization has appropriate quality, financial, organic growth and process effectiveness metrics.
The Opportunity Matrix (based on industry best practices) enables an organization to identify which areas of the new product development process are working well and what specific areas need improvement. These areas include Sustainability (of the process), Customer Satisfaction, Quality, Growth/Revenue, Profitability and Speed/Flexibility.
In order to truly realize the value of this tool, the survey must be taken by all functions involved in the product development process. This includes business, marketing, technology, engineering, manufacturing, purchasing, sales and quality, and also must include support functions like finance, testing, legal, communications, product stewardship and the like. The survey can be sliced and diced to assess business units, regions or even functions. Open-ended answers provide honest, rich and valuable information that can be used in the evaluation, refining and optimization of the process.
Periodic surveys over time can be used to view progress and improvement of the organization’s new product development process. As more organizations take the survey, this tool can also be used to benchmark one’s own organization against other similar companies around the world.
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