Innovation and Product Development

Lean Sigma Product Development

Every broken process presents an opportunity for radical improvement. The innovation and new product development processes at many companies are a perfect example. Symptoms of broken development processes include poor anticipation of customer needs, expensive prototypes, high product complexity, manufacturing difficulties, last-minute design changes, and large numbers of initial defects, all of which add up to delayed product launches and lost sales. 

If any of this sounds familiar, TBM can help. Our Lean Sigma Product Development (LSPD) approach transforms innovation and product development into a powerful competitive advantage. Leveraging your process improvement experience in other areas of the business, we can help you to design better products, with better quality, at a lower cost, and with quicker time to market. 

Lean Sigma Product Development removes wasted effort and dramatically compresses lead time. Activities that used to take months to move forward are either eliminated or reduced to weeks or even days.  The result is continuous, positive momentum from concept development to product launch.  A Lean Sigma Product Development approach can help your company: 

  • Bring new products from concept to market three to four times faster
  • Cut development costs by 50-75%
  • Leverage voice-of-customer (VOC) input to achieve customer-driven innovation
  • Design products for simple, efficient manufacturing 
  • Create production processes that flex to customer demand
  • Reduce start-up defects by 50-70% 
  • Eliminate late-stage design changes and launch delays 
  • Meet and exceed sales and profitability plans. 
Design Changes

 

One of the cornerstones of Lean Sigma Product Development is the Voice of the Customer (VOC) process for rating potential product features and taking a high-level look at a market sector to identify untapped opportunities. VOC initiatives create an accurate and up-to-date picture of customer desires. In many cases, what customers say they want, and what they are willing to pay for, are sharply different from what a company’s marketing and engineering teams anecdotally believe that customers want. For example, in this case study TBM client Vermeer Manufacturing Company shares how it uses VOC to collect market insights that help guide future growth. 

To learn more about Lean Sigma Product Development, check out the following case studies and articles:

“We’ve reduced the time from inception to going to market by 50 percent. By reducing the time this much we gain the revenue more quickly and free up resources in marketing and engineering to double the amount of products we’ve been able to introduce. We’re getting it right the first time and meeting customer expectations better.” -Paul Adelberg, Vice President of Lean Technology, Hayward Pool Products

MAKE THE COMPETITION IRRELEVANT


In the book, Blue Ocean Strategy (HBS, Boston, 2005), authors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne promote the use of “value innovation” as a way to separate market winners from also-rans. One of TBM’s oft-repeated mantras is that companies should leverage lean for growth by learning to run a different race. We tell our partners that once they have gotten their house in order by using lean principles and kaizen, they are ready to position themselves for growth by using value innovation. Instead of launching new products that complete in current, highly competitive markets, a value innovation approach uncovers market segments and product opportunities that were previously unknown.

Today our clients are using value innovation to focus on beating the competition by making the competition irrelevant.   As part of the Lean Sigma Product Development Process, creating a Value Innovation Curve (VIC) helps turn VOC insights into profitable new product and service offerings that open up new and uncontested market space. We work with clients to rate the key factors of a potential offering and compare them to competitors’ offerings. By zeroing in on what customers deem most important, companies can deliver radically superior value at low cost, and maximize the profit percentage that new products contribute to the bottom line.