Benefits

About the Workshop

This Workshop, for the first time, allows companies, in one intensive session, to compare their practices against industry best practices, and to determine where the gaps lie using their own assessment.

To run the workshop TechniCom sends two of its senior consultants to your site. After an introduction to the methodology, we delve into a description of best practices, and work with your team to review your company's business objectives. This understanding enables us to work together to develop the importance of each category. Then we break into small groups each of which assesses a group of practices as they exists today. Later we tabulate the answers, review the preliminary assessments, and each group stands and defends its ratings to its peers. In turn, we develop a group assessment among the attendees.

Having taken a critical look at the current performance and relative importance of the categories, we then lead the group into a mutual assessment of the "gaps," where improvements will most benefit the company.

Finally, we end the workshop by ranking those areas that most need improvement, and begin to develop the beginnings of an implementation plan. By the end of the workshop the attendees will have a clear understanding of how their practices compare to industry best practices and what needs to be to improved to close the gaps.

Why compare to best practices?

In this era of hyper competitiveness companies are focusing on improving the product development process generally the primary bottleneck to improving time to market. Some improvement opportunities are obvious to personnel within an organization. Other opportunities may not be obvious or there may be so many things to do that it becomes a question of where to start. Management wants to know answers to a number of questions. How do we compare with the rest of industry? How do we compare with the best in industry? What are our strengths and weaknesses? What are the best practices for product development that we should adopt? What improvements should be made? Where do we start? What are our priorities given the resources that we have available? What benefits can we expect? How can we figure this out quickly so that we can get started? Now a methodology, supported by software, and optionally this workshop, is available to answer these questions.

About the Product Development Best Practices Assessment Process

Approaching the improvement process

No organization can improve all aspects of product development at once. The implementation of product development best practices can best be viewed as a journey (continuing process improvement) rather than a destination. Priorities need to be developed for implementing the best practices of product development. The organization must start by understanding what practices should be adopted (what is possible). Next it must consider its strategic direction (e.g., being the low cost producer, the most innovative producer, the highest quality producer, flexibility to respond to new products and markets) given its market, its objectives, and its competitors. Next, the organization must assess its strengths and weaknesses. By focusing on the "gap" between where a company is and where it needs to be, priorities can be set for making improvements.

The process reviews 250 best practices that have been identified from researching and identifying many companies product development practices from around the world. The PDBPA provides a structured assessment methodology for the product development process based on these best practices. Our experienced consultants have conducted this assessment for the last five years, and have now developed a software-based self-assessment that describes these best practices and guides company personnel through the assessment process. This methodology offers the following benefits:

Identify best practices more quickly and cost effectively than traditional benchmarking and research;

Aid in economically assessing, measuring, and comparing the effectiveness of the product development process; and

Lead to prioritization of the high payoff improvement opportunities through gap analysis.

The breadth and depth of these best practices and the associated assessment identifies specific strategy, organizational, process, design optimization and technology practices to address as part of a product development improvement program. These 250 product development best practices are further organized into twenty eight categories for summarization and reporting purposes.

A company's product development activities are evaluated with respect to each of these best practices, and a quantitative rating is developed. A performance rating, when compared to that of other companies, gives an indication of the urgency of improving the development process.

Gap analysis focuses attention on the improvement opportunities that will yield the highest payoff. These are the areas that require the highest priority in improving the development process and will likely have the largest payoff. This analysis becomes the basis for identifying improvement actions and priori ties.

Planning and Implementing Improvements

Once categories with the largest gaps are identified, an examination of the performance ratings against individual best practice criterias help identify practices that require attention. This becomes the basis for developing priorities and, eventually, an improvement or implementation plan. Our consultants, knowledgeable in product development best practices, can aid in identifying priorities. For example, moving to a paperless environment with digital product data as the "master" record is not realistic until there is a certain level of CAD/CAE/CAM capability and network infrastructure in place.

Getting started

Contact us about the fee and more details. We assure you they are reasonable considering the results. At the conclusion of the session we should have helped you identify ways to save the cost of the workshop many times over. To get started contact at the address on our homepage or send us an e-mail.

About DRM Associates and TechniCom

DRM Associates and TechniCom are leading consulting firms in the area of product development. Both companies combine to conduct consultant led workshops using the PDBPA methodology. DRM's principal, Kenneth Crow, and TechniCom's principal, Raymond Kurland, have spoken at numerous conferences, authored many papers, contributed to books, conducted hundreds of workshops, guided management in client companies, and assisted product development teams.

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