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Gocious recently held a webinar to discuss the results and insights of a recent industry market research study that we conducted. The webinar, available to watch on-demand, presented some of the key insights that we uncovered. We ultimately discussed the ways manufacturers can optimize their product launch cycle times.
Product Launch Cycle Trends in the Age of Agile Manufacturing
We found that 62% of manufacturers are looking for ways to shorten their product launch cycle. Most of them are looking to PLM and digital transformation as the ways to shorten that cycle time. We talked about how PLM focuses on just helping in the development phase and where we see savings available in the strategy and planning phases of a product launch cycle.
Our survey data indicated that there appears to be a direct correlation between product complexity, the number of products, features, and dependencies between features, and the product launch cycle time. We talked about how product complexity is ok, but only if it is managed. Unmanaged product complexity for a manufacturer will ultimately cause them problems.. We previously published an ebook on reducing complexity and financial waste in manufacturing, which also discussed and looked at the issues of unmanaged product complexity.
Other interesting findings that we presented included:
- The number of people involved in the product definition and approval process, an average 43 people required to create and 33 people to approve
- The tools they are using to define their products, Excel, Google Docs, Jira, Aha, Asana and Pendo
- How many products, variants and features manufacturers have in their product lines
- How long it takes to develop and launch a product vs. how often products are launched
We explored ways manufacturers could save time in their product launch cycle, specifically during the strategy and planning phases:
- By looking for ways to be more efficient, including reusing features from other product lines
- Promoting collaboration between planning and development teams to reduce re-working of product plans
- Defining product configuration in the early phases of the planning process to give a more accurate plan to the product development teams
Lastly, we showed how manufacturers can simplify their product definition and planning to reduce their product launch cycle time and complement their digital transformation efforts using Gocious product roadmapping software.
You can download the webinar video and slides to hear the full discussion and to learn more about how product managers, planners, designers, and engineers, are meeting today's manufacturing challenges.
