Collaborate With Customers Design for Mass Customization Design for Manufacture Design for Quality & Reliability Implement Fast Time-to-Market Techniques Collaborate with Suppliers in Development

• Reduce time-to-market continuously
• Eliminate wasteful steps and processes
• Install and use a formal, written phase design review process
• Ensure quality control and escalating management approval for exiting each phase of the design process
• Prepare product specifications and control the changes

• Assume that each project manager will manage equally well the adherence to the product specifications; the schedule; the quality of the work; the communications with customers, marketing, manufacturing, suppliers, service, quality, reliability, finance; project expenses; product costs; ramp-up issues; etc.
• Assume that design issues can continue to be corrected during production ramp-up and full production
• Assume that the company's past time-to-market schedules cannot be shortened
• Assume that designers' time spent communicating with other groups is wasted time

• Ensures that every product development project deals with all the important issues to product a quality, cost-effective, customer-pleasing product on-time, every time
• Allows for the time-to-market to be compressed as confidence is gained that the process will control all the issues well and represent all the constituencies
• Defines the task interrelationships and dependencies better to permit more parallel processing and faster time-to-market
• Allows manufacturing and suppliers to manage their resources, schedules and costs more effectively

"It is a common belief in management practice today that one of the most effective ways to shorten development cycles is through the collaborative work of cross-functional development teams. But if anything is easier said than done, it is that marketing people, development engineers, and manufacturing engineers should collaborate rather then 'throw product specifications over the wall' to one another." - The Return Map: Tracking Product Teams, Harvard Business Review, Charles H. House and Raymond L. Price

"The first challenge is to get rid of unnecessary delays and costs. This is done by eliminating 'fumbles' - bottlenecks, changes, rework, and unnecessary work." - Lightning Strategies for Innovation, Willard I. Zangwill

"Nokia Chairman Jorma Ollila announced on July 27 that the release of two phones in the coming quarter would be delayed ... the stock market responded knocking Nokia shares 25% and chopping $60 billion off the company's market cap of $225 billion." - Business Week, August 14, 2000