Product and Service Innovation

As product and service innovations become increasingly complex with shrinking opportunity windows, traditional time-to-market approaches have become less effective. Product and Service Innovation However, Thomas Group's product and service innovation solutions dramatically reduce the time in 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 lies in focusing on the right projects and making sure they are managed effectively with the proper resources.

Our Approach

Thomas Group's new product and service innovation offerings include:

  • 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

Improving product and service innovation dramatically impacts your company’s bottomline. Thomas Group focuses on the drivers of overall time-to-market performance: speed (cycle time), quality, and productivity. For example, designing products manufactured with short cycle times and high yields is as important as designing those products more rapidly and should be equally considered an objective in achieving world-class time-to-market.

Actions that positively influence time-to-market include:

  • Understanding, managing, and scheduling constraint resources like labor availability, adequate skill levels, and materials
  • Designing rules that enable optimization of the development process and its outputs
  • Integrating design for manufacturability and serviceability at all stages of development
  • Incorporating key metrics to assess performance at three levels: project, process, and portfolio
  • Managing a portfolio that identifies, selects, and aligns resources around the highest priorities and prevents capacity overload
  • Effectively managing the product and service launch process to include pipeline tracking
  • Implementing a project management process that provides quick and effective decision making at the appropriate level
  • Identifying and managing risks
  • Rapidly communicating and resolving barriers in conjunction with project leaders
  • Encouraging effective functional participation and accountability
  • Implementing effective communication and feedback to accelerate continuous process improvement from cycles of learning
  • Appropriately using 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 increase product and service innovation program efficiency, enabling Breakthrough Performance. Thomas Group’s solutions to improve results, whether focused on a single activity or an entire enterprise, emphasize process. Our product and service innovation solutions address: