Product planning at an Electrolux subsidiary

A rather large number of product development projects are failures and some of them should never even have become projects. Studies show that a high quality new product process is the main thing that separates the best performers from the low ones. This paper presents a study concerning the front end product planning process at an Electrolux subsidiary. Our aim is to understand the product planning process of the company and its role in the integrated product development process at Electrolux. The stage-gate model presented by Cooper, complemented with views from other studies, forms the base when discussing the Electrolux case. The front-end process is defined to start with idea generation and ends with the approval for development, and consists of the three stages ideation, preliminary investigation and detailed investigation. Looking at the case of Electrolux it seems that a lot of the ideas presented in the literature have been adopted. The subsidiary has today a well established process for product development which develops products founded in strategic plans. Electrolux has also worked with introducing sophisticated management tools into the process, but there are more to be done there.