Product Development Support

GP's Operational Excellence Practice designed a Product Development Framework that provides a structured approach to integrating customer needs with manufacturing capabilities through a well-defined Gates and Phases process. The result is better products faster. Accelerated product development enables your company to meet the demands of sophisticated customers with products tailored to their preferences. It provides market leadership through faster payback on investment, higher market share, and increased profitability compared to the competition.

Our Product Development Framework consists of six elements: strategy, process, methods, tools, organization, and management. The foundation is an understanding of customer needs and market opportunities. It enables strategic choices between incremental, platform, and breakthrough development projects. The selected projects follow a concurrent and phased development process. Methods and tools such as "managing the front end," target costing, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), variety reduction, and product-data-management improve efficiency and effectiveness. Organization structure has a dramatic effect on development cycle time and is altered to support the development strategy. Finally, management of the development framework requires setting goals, measuring performance, appointing a development process owner, and continuously improving.