Timing is everything. As a designer, engineer or executive in today’s world, you are driven by the demand to get your products to market quickly.
Always a factor in consumer driven products, design and manufacturing cycle times are today being compressed across every industry. Regardless of your specific sector, rapid innovation and iteration is vital to provide your customers with the products that they want. All this, before your competition has the chance to do the same.
How optimising processes can help you get ahead of your competition
For you, successful product development and evolution relies on agility with your design and processes. The challenge of getting your product to market first and ahead of the competition requires the ability to scale your product development teams and the processes on which they run. To get ahead and stay ahead, you need to have a repeatable and flexible approach to your engineering process.
What are the challenges preventing process optimisation?
But, increasing complexity within the products that you develop and in your supply chain is creating unique challenges for companies across every industry. Chief among these challenges is how to accelerate time to market through design reuse; powering new product introductions. Too often, when developing new opportunities in new markets or with new product lines, you use valuable resources on new designs before you can realise any value from the intellectual property already created.
Companies are also looking for ways to keep up with and improve quality requirements, even as your product complexity dramatically increases. This is a goal that is no longer limited to a single stage within the product lifecycle. For most companies, the most actionable of these challenges is the lack of a central source of accurate and up-to-date engineering data. A single source of truth.
The use of various CAD tools within a single team can be confusing. Versioning, managing, and configuring products that are based on varying data types only compounds this challenge. What your teams need is a way to connect internal design with engineers, partners and even your customers. This means applying the concepts of an agile methodology, without sacrificing a process or tested approach.
How can you optimise your processes?
By mapping manufacturing processes and business initiatives against common opportunities for improvement in manufacturing, it can help you to identify and access value in every corner of your organisation. The ability to reconfigure an existing Bill of Materials to incorporate new requirements, capture quality related data from test, manufacturing and service activities, as well as managing data with a disciplined and product centric approach are all crucial functions of a fast and efficient development process.
To win in the marketplace, your product development process must span the entire lifecycle of the product; from planning through support. We understand this and deliver technology solutions that help you identify, capture and ultimately realise true product and service advantage as you work to take your company through to the next level.
Do you want to find out more about optimising your processes? Request a free PTC Value Road Map consultation
