Competitive advantage is critical to the success and longevity of your company. And while most companies have recognized the role that lean principles have played in manufacturing to gain this advantage, few have applied those same principles to their engineering and product development processes.
Lean can improve engineering efficiency and reduce product development cycle times, resulting in extra product development capacity that you didn’t know you had. This extra capacity can be leveraged for incredible cost savings, applied to improve product quality or refocused on the key to increasing long-lasting competitive advantage – innovation. Improving the product development process empowers you to lengthen the years that your products sustain and lead in the marketplace.
In an attempt to reduce labor costs, the trend now is to move jobs to low-cost countries. This practice, however, is often misused and rarely creates a sustainable advantage.
Efficiency gains lead to permanent cost reductions and increased revenue; offshoring can only temporarily reduce costs. In addition, efficiency gains reduce Product Development cycle times, improve time to market and increase quality; because offshoring requires such a concerted effort to achieve desired results, it can deliver the opposite effects.
Doing the same processes, enduring the same product development wastes, but simply reducing the unit costs is not lean. Removing the waste, improving the processes and eliminating the costs are lean. And because lean product development looks different in each company, reflecting each one’s unique processes, culture and intellectual capital, it is difficult for the competition to copy. This gives YOU a head start with the potential to endure – the elusive advantage the Gartner Group refers to as “competitive durability.”
Our PLM solutions were designed to help companies drive user productivity, realize engineering efficiency, reduce product development cycles and leverage product, process and resource knowledge to develop better products more quickly and at less cost than ever before.
Leveraging corporate knowledge empowers you to drive user productivity. Simulation technology and virtual prototyping enables you to evaluate new ideas & concepts without associated physical costs. And analyzing design alternatives early in the process advances your ability to meet your customers’ needs and reduces the risk and costs of product failures.
In some cases, application of Lean Principles has provided a 60-70% reduction in product development time which allows the company to reduce development costs and improve time to marketą.
Improve Your Engineering Efficiency
Reduce Your Product Development Cycle
Increase Your Innovative Capacity
Drive down cost
Increase output
Improve time to market
Reduce resource needs
Leverage Time Savings to Improve Innovation
Create a “category killer” product
Determining where to begin with Lean Product Development can be a challenge. To find out more about the benefits of Lean and how to begin applying these principles, start by clicking one of the links below:
¹ Clifford Fiore, Accelerated Product Development, Productivity Press, New York, 2005
