Professional, holistic and cross-functional advice
As a manager with responsibility for product management or product development, you are exposed to a wide range of challenges in your environment: Globalisation, digitalisation, increasing complexity of requirements and products, new technologies and a shortage of skilled workers are just some of them. The expectations placed on you internally are also high: even more competitive products, shorter development times, greater efficiency. In addition, you have to successfully complete your product development projects in day-to-day business.
But with all this pressure, do you have enough room for manoeuvre to ensure that all aspects of your company's product development process are efficient and fit for the future? You have your own solutions, but it is difficult to implement and anchor them sustainably.
That's why you should think about getting support from a boutique consultancy specialising in product development that also has a high level of change expertise. Regardless of whether it is a major transformation or a smaller change initiative. Our consultants take a holistic and cross-functional approach and work with you to develop new strategies, optimise your process landscape and support you in organisational development. This will help you remain innovative, become faster and improve your cost structures.
The three drivers of performance improvement
High-performance product development is a multi-discipline battle. The classic drivers are still valid, but management has become far more complex. Fast-moving markets keep product requirements in motion until shortly before series production - and even afterwards. New methods, such as digitalisation and agile working, open up a much broader spectrum of processes required for efficient work organisation. The challenge for companies to find the right working point in the magic triangle is therefore growing.
Products must be developed that the customer values. The use of resources should be minimised and the time-to-market must be tailored to the customer and target markets. The three drivers of performance improvement in product development are
The three areas of competence for lasting change
In order to achieve these goals ever more effectively, industrial companies require an cross-functional, holistic R&D management system. This must break down silo structures and enable sustainable change towards a process-oriented, increasingly efficient organisation. You need to know your core competencies, in order to be able to quickly adapt strategies in the event of disruptive changes. You need to support the implementation of your corporate- and business unit strategies with transparent and coordinated product and technology strategies, as well as platform- and module strategies. You need processes that ensure high development quality, cost efficiency and speed. And you need to balance your global development organisation in such a way that it can produce market- and customer-oriented products on the one hand, but at the same time leverage all cross-product synergies through a process of standardisation and modularisation:
- Your strategy defines goals and provides a source of orientation.
- Your processes are aligned with your strategy and enable its implementation.
- Your organisation executes your processes and achieves the defined goals.
The three areas of expertise - strategy, processes and organisation - can rarely be considered separately.
Example 1: If you decide in favour of a modular strategy, you need a preliminary module development process in addition to your product development process. You also deliberately establish a conflict in your development organisation. The product developers want to customise modules specifically for your product. Your module developers, however, have the task of establishing standards. You must now establish and balance these two interest groups in a matrix organisation, e.g. by using lean product lines vertically and implementing a cross-sectional organisation structured by modules horizontally.
Example 2: If you want to introduce strategic product management, you must anchor it in the organisational structure, define its role and describe interfaces. You need to empower employees to develop a product strategy. You need a process for project portfolio management in order to implement the product strategy with the right projects. And you need to anchor the tasks of product management in the product development process.
We make research and development more efficient
Improving the performance of your product development is never over; it is a continuous process of improvement. Sometimes you will launch major initiatives, and sometimes you will drive the continuous improvement of established building blocks. But you will only achieve irreversible improvements if you accompany all your improvement initiatives with professional change management. That’s why we’re on hand for you: We combine specialist and industry knowledge with change expertise. And that makes the difference:
Our consultants have been experiencing and shaping change in traditional industries for three decades. Their experience has flowed into a proprietary maturity model that forms part of the foundation of our consulting approach. It serves as a tool for a systematic stocktaking approach in which we assess the current maturity level of your product development and identify development scenarios. In doing so, we specify the necessary practices in strategy, processes and organisation that will elevate you to a higher level of maturity. Learn more about our Smart Development Assessment.
The benefit to you
- You are guided by the three drivers of performance improvement.
- You take an cross-functional and holistic approach to finding solutions.
- You use a Smart Development Assessment to determine where you stand and to derive the next steps for improvement.
- You coordinate the individual solution modules of the competence fields of strategy, processes and organisation in such a way that they achieve your goals.
- You continuously develop your integrated R&D management system.
- Professional change management makes all your initiatives irreversibly good.