New Product Development

Do your new product vitality checks reflect your forecasts? It is not too surprising to find that many do actually fall short, why? Well, as you know it all starts with good understanding of the market needs and wants.

These needs and wants can be extensive and overwhelming to a business. More sophisticated development programs include Voice of the Business criteria which allows statistical 'weighting' of voice of the customer inputs. The voice of the business criteria, if known by your customer facing staff will allow filtering of all received VotC information and ensure that all data captured is relevant to the general direction and capabilities of the business.

Visibility of VotC data for design and marketing staff will help to align the needs, wants and expectations of the customer to all new product development. The value will be seen in several forms, namely:
Understanding of historical issues, directly from the source of concernVisibility of competitors successes and limitationsAwareness of expectations (form, function, technological requirements)

The latter is extremely significant as new product development, if left unchecked, can produce products that far exceed the customer requirements. Development engineering can possess a wish to prove their technological capabilities and provide a whole wealth of functionality that will typically not be required, or understood by the customer, ultimately equalling non-value added cost.

Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA) conducted at the design stage will benefit hugely from good VotC. There is nothing worst in a customer's eyes than a business developing product that is contrary to what the market place requires, or adding historically poor design features into new product.

All VotC captured can be designed to become input into Quality Function Deployment (House of Quality) which will provide the ground requirements for successful product launches. Training is available for this valuable subject - please contact us for further information.