It was timely to read the AMR Research article by Lance Travis and David O'Brien who mention that Engineering Services for NPD is likely to go up to 41% in the next 1-2 years compared to 29% this year.
New Product Development (NPD) involves some steps as the PDMA will tell you. My New Product Development MBA students probably get tired of the 7 steps ( from Willsey's delightfully short and crisp article) that forms the bedrock of the NPD process in my classes. These steps include:
- Generating Ideas
- Screening Ideas
- Developing and Testing Concepts
- Conducting Business Analysis
- Product Development
- Test Marketing
7. Launch and Commercialization
The aim in NPD is to reduce the cycle time of NPD to the market and the Engineering industry is really waking up to the possibilities of outsourcing parts of the NPD process ( particularly sub parts of step 5 above). GE had figured this out very early and other Engineering majors like UTC are doing the same. The big companies can off course start their own subsidiaries overseas and several top companies have opened their Engineering design branches overseas. The question is – how do the smaller manufacturing companies re-deploy their workforce into the early and later steps ( Idea Generation- Steps 1-4 …and Launch and Marketing 6-7) while reducing cost and time in step 5 (Product Development) through Outsourcing of Engineering Services. Contact StratoServe.
See Steps in Engineering Outsourcing : What goes out – must come back