As per APQC (worlds foremost authority in benchmarking & best practices) recent studies on New Product development for industrial products orgnization, the average cycle time for development of totally new product is about 185 days and for extension of exisiting products & services its about 120 days. Further more the percentage of products launched on time & within budget is only about 50%. Clearly, B2B customer experience on this account will be very low; While these metrics are critical for companies, in most companies product development. technically is only product extension and variants and the time to market should be even lower in such cases.
Product development process are highly cross functional processes and involves teams from marketing to dispatch. In most companies, these processes are still on excel sheets and mails which leads to challenges in coordination and eventually lower customer satisfaction. Deploying a full ERP grades software may be the ideal thing to do but given the challenges on full scale ERP like creation of material codes for sample developments, sourcing & procurement and test reporting of incoming goods etc can lead to inordinate delays. Especially for a medium sized manufacturer that is mainly focused on developing variants, deploying a full scale ERP can only add to delays.
No-Code Solutions
Utilising the power of No-Code/Low code platforms can transform this process quickly and bring in the much needed efficiencies. For introduction , a No-code development platform is a tool for building software applications without coding; a popular and promising alternative to traditional software development for non-technical business users hoping to build their own full-fledged applications. In addition, most No-Code platforms have built in reporting applications which can help you control the processes with better visualisation.
Like any another application, Product development on No-Code can be embedded with rules, workflows and authorisations to control the risks on the process. These controls & authorisation are must for Product development to bring focus on developing the right products/samples for right & profitable set of customers and help in optimising the customer experience levels.
No code platforms can help companies to completely transform this product development process in weeks if not days. The most crucial aspect of any process transformation lies in the ability to Measure and provide data quickly enough to team so that actions can be initiated at the right time. No-Code solutions also have easy to use visualisation tools( see figure below) which can help to establish the process indicators and ensure that team have access to information at any point of time.
In summary, we believe any organisation struggling with cross functional processes like NPD can utilise the power of No-Code solution to transform & bring visibility to performance levels in a matter of few weeks.
