Ensure Customer Satisfaction by Approaching New Product Development with a Solid Requirements Blueprint
When it comes to New Product Development and Introduction (NPDI), nothing is more important than getting the product right. Research shows that 50 percent of product introductions fail because they did not meet customer requirements. Meeting the needs of the customer, or "Customer Needs Management," is critical for a product to achieve marketplace success, satisfy contractual commitments and meet quality and regulatory standards.
UGS addresses Customer Needs Management with Teamcenter™ software's requirements management solution. Just as a builder needs a set of blueprints to determine how to construct a home, engineers need guidelines to determine how to design and build a product to meet customer needs.
Product requirements serve as the blueprints for product development, representing customer needs, market needs, industry regulations/guidelines, quality standards, etc. To achieve these product goals, it's essential for a product development organization to effectively communicate requirements to all downstream decision-makers, including engineers, so everyone can understand and keep up with product requirements. It is also critical for those ultimately responsible for marketing and selling the product to understand the key value points to customers. Requirements can be the best guide to the products' differentiators and value.
So the question is: How do companies keep up with requirements?
Looking at the typical product lifecycle with each part of the organization represented, we see that marketing learns what the customer wants and creates feature specs that accurately describe those wants. These are typically "thrown over the wall" to design, where engineers continue to translate those wants into designs that can be thrown over to the manufacturing organization and so on. Through this process, it's easy for people to lose sight of the product requirements as they are lost in formal design documentation (that isn't trusted to be up-to-date) or in systems or processes that are isolated from the product development process. With requirements represented in such disjointed systems, it can be a challenge for engineers to weigh conflicting requirements and document the tradeoff decisions made to balance customer needs with regulatory compliance, legislative and liability concerns.
The result is that the requirements lose their influence over the product decisions - and ultimately, the product that's being developed. The evolution of the requirements through the lifecycle is difficult to track, and engineering decisions are difficult to justify without a link back to the original requirements. Based on the method of requirements tracing a company uses, they increase the likelihood of a "runaway project" - in other words, a product that fails to meet time/cost/quality targets.
When requirements are disconnected from the lifecycle process, engineers often need to make judgment calls based on their interpretation of the customer wants, regulatory requirements and quality standards. This series of deviations from the original product intent often results in a product that misses the mark.
With Teamcenter's requirements management capability, UGS integrates requirements management within the Teamcenter Engineering or Teamcenter Enterprise data management environment so engineers and all downstream decision-makers can see the relationships of requirements to the decisions they make, and their designs stay aligned with requirements along each step of the process. The result is a consistent view of customer wants across the entire organization -- giving them a better chance of delivering what the customer really wants.
The Teamcenter portfolio allows the entire organization to see how the customer's requirements relate to all parts of the development process. Teamcenter offers the following advantages to help companies deliver products that meet or exceed customer expectations:
- Complete requirements traceability to original sources vs. disconnected, isolated requirements document
- Easy access via web browser vs. proprietary application with user restrictions
- Familiar Microsoft® Windows® desktop interface vs. learning curve of proprietary application
- Connected requirements to lifecycle processes vs. standalone document/database with limited visibility by downstream decision-makers
- Automatic generation of requirements documentation vs. time wasted creating reports, documents
Requirements not only need to be defined, they need to be delivered to everyone. With Teamcenter, requirements can be quickly and cost-effectively integrated with Teamcenter's data management solution.
For more information, download the new UGS white paper, "Customer Needs Management: Leveraging Requirements Management to Deliver Products that Customers Will Buy." Or ask your UGS account representative how Teamcenter's requirements management blueprint can improve your company's new product development and introduction.
