Product and Service Innovation

Doing the Right Projects; Doing the Projects Right

As product and service innovations become increasingly complex and opportunity windows shrink, traditional time-to-market approaches have become ineffective. Product and Service Innovation Thomas Group Product and Service Innovation solutions dramatically reduces the time by which new ideas get turned into revenue by reducing time-to-market activities and corresponding costs. The result is more control over the future of your company. The key to success is focusing on the right projects and making sure they are managed effectively with the proper resources to see them through to fruition.

Our Approach

New Product and Service Innovation process includes:

  • Clearly detailed customer needs and product/service specifications
  • Clearly defined process steps, outputs, and responsibilities
  • Process controls, stage-gate, and design reviews, including:
    • Investigation
    • Feasibility
    • Development
    • Pilot/Test
    • Launch
    • Deployment

The Right Project...and Doing the Project Right will always have a dramatic impact on your company’s bottom line results. Thomas Group focuses on the drivers of overall time-to-market performance: speed (cycle time), quality (the first time), and productivity. These drivers apply to the time-to-market process itself, as well as its outputs.

For example, designing products manufactured with short cycle time and high yield is as important as designing those products more rapidly and should be considered an equal objective in achieving world-class time-to-market.

Factors that typically influence time-to-market drivers include:

  • Understanding, managing, and scheduling constraint resources; i.e. labor availability, adequate skill levels, materials, etc.
  • Design rules which enable optimization of the development process and its outputs
  • Integration of design for manufacturability and serviceability at all stages of development
  • Incorporation of key metrics to assess performance at three levels–project, process, and portfolio
  • A portfolio management process that identifies, selects, and aligns resources around the highest priority projects and prevents capacity overload
  • Effective management of the product and service launch process to include pipeline tracking
  • A project management process that provides quick and effective decision making at the appropriate level
  • Early identification and management of risks
  • Rapid communication and escalation of barriers to project leaders for quick resolution
  • Effective functional participation and accountability
  • Effective communication and feedback to accelerate continuous process improvement from cycles of learning
  • Appropriate use of technology to enhance the process, including communications tools for decision making support and collaboration

Components of Product and Service Innovation

Well defined and aligned processes and procedures will increase Product and Service Innovation program efficiency, enabling Breakthrough Process Performance. Thomas Group’s solutions to improve results, whether focused on a single activity or an entire enterprise, focus on process. Product and Service Innovation solutions address:

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