A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Why PLM should revise NPI products?

Why PLM should revise NPI products?
Oleg
Oleg
17 March, 2015 | 3 min for reading

new-product-introduction

One of the challenges most of manufacturing companies are facing these days is related to ability to introduce new product to the market. Think about manufacturers of electronic gadgets that can miss holidays sales or supplier that misses deliveries on new components for OEM manufacturer. The cost of missed timeline sometimes is so high that it cannot be recovered when you development is going off schedule. Therefore, New Product Introduction (NPI) is one of the important elements of PLM strategies for many companies. These type of solutions are provided by most of PLM vendors and usually part of their Program and Project Management portfolio. You can follow few links to see examples – Aras PLM NPI, Autodesk PLM360 NPI, ENOVIA NPI, Siemens PLM NPI. I’m sure you can Google “PLM NPI” and fine more.

What caught my attention is that all NPI / NPDI products and methodologies are focusing on organizing of waterfall stage-gate process to follow up in order to achieve product development goals. Typically you can see it as a sequence of Concept, Development, Testing, Launch. The details can vary as you can see in few pictures below, but the essence of NPI process is the same.

Aras / Infor

plm-npi-1

Autodesk PLM 360

plm-npi-2

It occurred to me that traditional PLM NPI is a bit outdated in a modern world of lean and agile product development methods. Agile product development is focusing on a series of short development cycles (sprints) and it became hugely popular and successful in software development of the past decade. It goes opposite to something that we familiar as waterfall process. You can read more by learning about Scrum, Kanban, XP. The ideas of agile and lean are coming to manufacturing too. Last year, I shared some of my thoughts about that in a blog – Who will make PLM for eXtreme Manufacturing?

Here is the thing… All PLM products are focusing on NPI and project management implementation actually thinking about traditional NPI model. They are mostly focused on a workflow and waterfall process. Waterfall processes are dying in a modern development world. At the same it is a mainstream organization large companies are using for product development. But… for how long? Large companies are looking how to innovate and to work differently. At the same time, they are providing very little support for teams that want to follow agile methodologies.

So, what is wrong with waterfall NPI process? Below, I put some of ideas why waterfall NPI process can give you very little help in development of innovative product together with customers.

1- I know what customer wants.

2- I know what features to build.

3- Too much focus on launch date and stage gates.

4- No trial, no errors process.

What is my conclusion? Customer agile development can be a new way for PLM to support manufacturing companies. It is can be more efficient to innovate in small teams. It can bring new agile methods and change product development process. It can replace existing NPI with complexity of waterfall processes. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of ArtJSan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
24 September, 2021

Earlier this week, I attended the CIMdata PLM forum. You can find my first article with comments here – PLM...

3 August, 2009

What is the role of Search in PLM? This is question I want to discuss today. This year is busy...

21 September, 2019

Cloud application development is everywhere these days. However, CAD users are stuck in the desktop reality. There are many reasons...

9 October, 2021

There is no topic in engineering and manufacturing software that can raise more debates than Part Numbers. I remember discussing...

10 March, 2017

Digital transformation is a new trend and manufacturing companies are exploring how to become leaders in a new digital society...

12 December, 2021

For the last decade, PLM and information technology have become the foundation for building a competitive edge. PLM expanded and...

25 April, 2020

Data is quickly becoming a core element of every business these days. In my opinion, manufacturing is clearly a big...

22 February, 2025

A digital thread is a data-driven framework that connects and integrates information across a product’s entire lifecycle, from concept to...

30 December, 2017

Complex is not a good thing. Complex things are prone to break. There is a good chance complex project will...

Blogroll

To the top