Simultaneous product and production process development; the key to speed and business success

As a result of increasing international competition, product fifecycles have been shortening in almost all product categories. In many cases the total lime-to-market has become longer than the economic lifetime of the product. This has resulted in the demand of considerably faster product and production development processes in order to keep up with the competition. Simultaneously, differentiation of mass produced base products for various market areas, customer categories and new applications has increased the need for flexibility in creating design variants. At first glance these contradictory requirements seem impossible to meet, unless traditional methods of managing product development are radically changed. However, understanding the nature of R&D and reorganising the development process accordingly, a simple reconciliation of the controversy will result. The paper describes one way of meeting this challenge by simultaneous development of the product plan, the production plan, and the investment plan. Parallel execution of these plans using cross-functional teams result in considerable reduction of the time to-market of the product, while at the same time greatly reducing the possibilities for product and production problems.