New Tools Abound

A driving force of NPD is the will to continually hold or expand market share by the introduction of new products to satisfy market desire. So the use of product development software in a range of niches - from CAD tools at the front end through to data integration and change management software to back-end engines that aid analysis for manufacturability and for quality/reliability analysis - continues to grow.

Dr Robert J Graves, the Krehbiel Professor of Emerging Technologies at Dartmouth College New Hampshire in the US, believes some of the more interesting developments have been in the area of new software to recognize design chain issues in enterprises where design activities are separated geographically and organizationally from those of fabrication and assembly activities.

The danger is that this separation renders the design process vulnerable to more design review iterations, higher design development costs and longer time-to-market cycles, which can make the review seem like an "open-loop" activity. Newer software technologies are allowing for characterization of details of manufacturing equipment in the distributed design chain and bringing this knowledge to the hands of the design engineer in new product development. Some technologies even support product management functions as part of a more robust back-end endeavour.

"The bottom line with these newer software products is to make the product development function more agile, to achieve shorter time-to-market by reducing design review cycles and cycle time and improving the integration of design chain members with the design engineers, while bringing near real-time cost and availability information for purchased parts into the design process to join with traditional data used in CAD systems.

"It's an exciting time for those looking at the product development process and the changes wrought by changing business practices with respect to outsourcing. This revolution in building better and more extensive support tools is just beginning and there is much ground to be covered," Graves says.

Design's the Thing

Experts say in future, IT systems that support new product development must be viewed as existing within larger environments, or conceptual domains, of information sharing and end-to-end, cross-process integration. Companies must stop thinking NPD and start thinking integrated product development (IPD).

Andy Herdan, an IT and NPD expert with US implementation services company Kaufman Global, says adopting this perspective requires that IT systems be optimized for supporting the organization as a whole rather than being optimized for supporting localized "stove-piped" requirements. But it can also help the corporation achieve competitive advantage by incorporating functions previously treated as being "offline" into enterprise-wide business processes.

Herdan says integrated systems, where information is passed automatically between processes, fall into two primary categories:

• ERP systems. Data created by different functions exists in a single large database - for example, purchasing linked to receiving linked to accounts payable linked to finance linked to cost history. Requires tightly defined business processes and interfaces.

• Product Data Management (PDM) systems. Data created by different functions is managed in a single "repository", with full data mining capability. Passing between functions should be automated through workflow tools. This requires well-defined product structure models, standardized gating processes and common methodologies for developing and launching new products.